Thursday, May 16, 3pm
Disrupted
by Melisa Tien
In the male-dominated tech arena, two women join forces to create a brand-new app—one that tracks the menstrual cycle—and form a partnership that is tested to its limits.
Melisa Tien is a playwright and librettist invested in making formally unconventional, socially relevant, and emotionally evocative work. A resident of New Dramatists, she is the author of the plays Best Life (JACK, 2021), Yellow Card, Red Card (Ice Factory, 2017), Refrain (Wild Project, 2011), The Boyd Show, and Familium Vulgare; librettist of the operas Forever (Washington National Opera, 2024), The Big Swim (Houston Grand Opera/Asia Society Texas Center, 2024), Family Heirloom (Experiments in Opera, 2024), Song of the Nightingale (On Site Opera/Arts Brookfield, 2023), and The Beehive (University of Northern Iowa, 2023), lyricist for the song cycles Swell (HERE, 2021) and Daylight Saving, co-creator of the podcast/auditory experience Active Listening, and creator of the theatrical experiences Untitled Landscape and Community Forest. She has been published in the anthologies Theater Artists Making Theatre With No Theater (Tripwire Harlot Press, 2020) and Modern Music for New Singers: 21st Century American Art Songs (North Star Music, 2021), and has authored essays for New Music USA and Innovations in Socially Distant Performance. She is currently a librettist for the American Opera Project’s Composers & the Voice program, and a recent member of Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative, Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Ground Floor Residency Lab, Experiments in Opera’s Writers’ Room, and The Assembly Theater Project’s Deceleration Lab. She earned a BA in English from UCLA, and an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University. More at www.melisatien.com.