CELESTE LECESNE (he/they) wrote the short film Trevor which won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short and he is co-founder of The Trevor Project, the largest 24-hour suicide prevention and crisis intervention lifeline for LGBT and questioning youth.  He is also the co-founder of The Future Perfect Project, a national arts initiative that offers LGBTQ+ youth the opportunity to express their vision of the future. He has written three novels for young adults, and created The Letter Q, a collection of letters by queer writers written to their younger selves. Celeste was the executive producer of After The Storm, a feature length documentary film that follows the lives of 12 young people in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and he has written for TV (Will & Grace and Armistead Maupin’s Further Tales of the City). An actor as well as a writer, Celeste has appeared in Sex & the City, the 30th anniversary Off-Broadway production of Boys in the Band, the original Off-Broadway production of Cloud 9 and the 2013 Broadway production of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man. He is best known for his award-winning solo shows, One Man Band, Word of Mouth (Drama Desk & Outer Critics Circle Awards) and The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey (Outer Critic Circle). The NYTimes has praised him as being “among the most talented solo performers of his (or any) generation.” Celestelecesne.com

KEVIN HOURIGAN (he/him) is a director and producer based in New York. His theater directing credits include Diana Oh’s The Infinite Love Party (Bushwick Starr: co-creative director), Elixir (Pipeline Theater Co.), A Streetcar Named Desire (Precariat Productions), Another Rose (Virgin Voyages: Immersive Director), Queen of the Night (Beijing: Immersive Director and Lead Consultant; NYC: Assistant Director), Imagine: Yemen (Signature Center), Farmed (Joe’s Pub and others), L’Histoire Du Soldat at (Norfolk Chamber Music Festival), Uncle Vanya (Brooklyn College), Imagine Sissyphus Happy (Pace University, Cenerentola (Curtis Opera Theater); Talk to Me About Shame in (NYFringe Festival: Fringe Award). He has directed workshops and readings of new work for writers including Craig Lucas, Naomi Wallace, Kia Corthron, Kara Lee Corthron, Truth Future Bachman, Brendan Pelsue, Mirando Rose Hall, Tegan McLeod, Keelay Gipson, and others. Hourigan is the recipient of an Individual Artist Commission from the New York State Council for the Arts, and was the inaugural Directing Fellow and later the Producing Associate at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater.

MICHAEL KRASS has designed costumes, and sometimes scenery, collaboratively for a plethora of new plays, musicals and dances over many years. Recent projects include Hadestown and What the Constitution Means to Me in New York, but his work ranges to The Gate in Dublin, the Mariinsky in St. Petersburg, Russia, and regional theaters all over the U.S.  For many years he proudly taught undergrad theatre students at New York University and is currently advising in the grad program at Brown University.