Esperanza Rosales Balcárcel (she/they) is a trans Guatemalan artist, born in Guatemala City and raised in Norwalk, Connecticut. Her works are spiritual and physically adventurous narratives driven by dance, poetry and passionate characters that give Queer BIPOC voices a space to interrogate core wounds and offer them a path towards healing. Esperanza's plays have been supported by TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, Roundabout Theatre, Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts, the Stanford Department of Theater and Performance Studies, the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center and the Breaking the Binary Theatre Festival. Esperanza is the recipient of the Princeton Ward Prize for Fiction, the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Scholarship, the Paul Greene Award from the National Theatre Conference and the Kennedy Center's Latinx Playwriting Award and Paula Vogel Playwriting Award (Finalist) for their play Color Boy. Her play Lupe Finds Me in the Garden of Dreams is a finalist for the Leah Ryan Prize, the 2024 O'Neill Playwrights Conference and the Van Lier Fellowship at Rattlestick Theater. Along with writing, Esperanza is an active producer and was one of the 2022 Producing Artistic Directors of the Yale Summer Cabaret, where their collective produced an entire season of new plays by Queer BIPOC writers, including Maia Novi's Invasive Species and a.k. payne's BurnBabyBurn: An American Dream. Most recently, her monologue, Soledad's Journey, was featured in Breaking the Binary Theatre Festival's Bliss: A Collection of Commissioned Scenes and Monologues, where it was performed by Indya Moore at the Public Theater. She is currently a Teaching Artist for the Public Theater, a Drama Teacher at Brooklyn Prospect Charter High School and a Lecturer in Playwriting at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, where she produced the 2024 Carlotta Festival of New Plays. BA: Princeton, MFA: Yale.

Adin Walker is a frequent collaborator with the internationally-touring dance, puppetry and climate-justice focused Phantom Limb Company, whose production Falling Out about the 2011 tsunami and radiation disaster in Fukushima premiered in BAM's Next Wave Festival. Walker recently directed the world premieres of Yilong Liu's PrEP Play, or Blue Parachute with the New Conservatory Theater Center and Adam Ashraf Elsayigh's Data Queen for Golden Thread's ReOrient Festival, both in San Francisco. Other directing includes Roger Q. Mason's The White Dress (New York City), L M Feldman's Grace, or the Art of Climbing (New Jersey), and Allison Gregory's Not Medea (New Jersey). In Summer 2024, Walker will direct Jessica Kahkoska's new musical Wild Fire at San Francisco's Z Space. Walker is currently in residence at Stanford doing a PhD in Performance Studies and has recently published essays in the journals TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Theatre Topics and New Review of Film and Television Studies. www.adinwalker.com