Benjamin Weiner began composing for theater in high school, when he wrote a ragtime score for a production of The Tempest. At Columbia University, he scored productions and began writing his own plays where sound and music were integral pieces of the work. He studied playwriting under Ellen McLaughlin, Julia Jordan, and Sylvan Oswald, and was the theater department’s nominee for Columbia’s Sudler Prize.

After developing a play called Wave Point as his thesis, in collaboration with deaf actor Garrett Zuercher, Benjamin received a Core Apprenticeship from the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis to continue to work on the piece, culminating in a workshop and reading in Minnesota. He taught at Saint Ann’s School for three years, developed theater with his students, and collaborated on a new full-length musical performed by the middle school.

He continues to write for theater, as well as film. Recent work has included music for pieces at Dixon Place, Ars Nova & the Brick Theatre, a reading of an original musical at Access Theatre, and music for a short film starring James Franco and Rashida Jones. He is currently working with director Ben Kamine to adapt Yiddish folktales into an anthology of new short plays.

Keith Paul Medelis is a theatre director, producer, designer & teaching artist based in Brooklyn, NY. He is the founder and Artistic Director of The New Theatre Project based in Ann Arbor, Michigan and currently the Creative Director of Upstream Artists’ Collective in Brooklyn. Keith has developed several world premieres and devised performances with TNTP, Performance Network, The Ringwald, Bookshop Workshops, Variations Theater Company, and the University of Michigan.

As a teaching artist he has worked with Brooklyn College, the Professional Performing Arts School, Ann Arbor’s Pioneer High School, The Play Group Theatre, and the Interlochen Center for the Arts. Producing work has included New Works Brooklyn featuring new work from José Rivera, Anne Washburn, and Mac Wellman, and serving as festival emissary for Todd Shalom and Niegel Smith’s Elastic City. He has served as the Production Stage Manager for productions at The Flea Theater, directed by Niegel Smith, and at La MaMa and the Bushwick Starr for Superhero Clubhouse.

He is currently a writer for Theasy.com, the Marketing Director for Planet Connections Theater Festivity, and directing productions for Upstream’s Elemental New Work Series and the Professional Performing Arts School. MFA: Brooklyn College under Tom Bullard and Mary B. Robinson.

Upstream Artists’ Collective is a group of interdisciplinary artists making theater with an environmental conscience, seeking to reexamine what it means to be human on a global scale. Upstream develops new work via conventional & devised processes, and reimages existing work with an eco-arts aesthetic.