Radiolab Host Latif Nasser, Biochemist Mandë Holford, Neuroscientist Daniela Schiller join Playwrights Sam Chanse & Lloyd Suh & Science Editor Sophie Bushwick for 2024 EST/Sloan Zoom Event

Top row, from left: Latif Nasser, Mandë Holford, Daniela Schiller

Bottom row, from left: Sam Chanse, Lloyd Suh, Sophie Bushwick

Where do ideas for plays come from? How do you develop a play? How is an EST/Sloan play different?

PLAYWRIGHTS! JOIN US ON TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2024 AT 8:00 PM ON ZOOM FOR THE 2024 EST/SLOAN ARTIST CULTIVATION VIRTUAL EVENT

The EST/Sloan Artist Cultivation Event is the annual far-ranging and free-wheeling discussion among scientists, science writers, and playwrights about science, storytelling, and what makes plays work. This year’s event will be online and is free for any playwright interested in developing a play about science or technology. Registration is required. Once registered, you will receive the event access link in your confirmation email. You can register here.

WHAT MAKES A PLAY ABOUT SCIENCE GREAT?

“To stimulate artists to create credible and compelling work exploring the worlds of science and technology and to challenge the existing stereotypes of scientists and engineers in the popular imagination.”—this has been the mission of The Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project (EST/Sloan Project, for short) for the past 25 years. Over that time the EST/Sloan Project has awarded more than $3 million in grants to some 300 playwrights and theater companies. More than 150 productions of EST/Sloan-developed plays have been mounted nationwide. Commissions range from $5,000 to $10,000.

Applications for this year’s EST/Sloan commissions are currently open and will be accepted through November 15, 2024. You can view previous commission recipients on the EST/Sloan webpage.

Two related events culminate each EST/Sloan season:

1) The First Light Festival is a months-long series of readings and workshops that showcase plays in development, and is currently in progress through December 12.

2) A full mainstage production of at least one work every season. Recent mainstage productions have included Franklinland by Lloyd Suh about William and Ben Franklin and experiments scientific and otherwise (currently running through November 3), Las Borinqueñas (2024) by Nelson Diaz-Marcano about the birth control pill trials in Puerto Rico in the 1950s, Smart (2023) by Mary Elizabeth Hamilton about AI technology and trust, what you are now (2022) by Sam Chanse about memory and trauma, Behind the Sheet (2019) by Charly Evon Simpson about how American gynecology began with experiments on slaves (a NY Times Critic’s Pick), BUMP by Chiara Atik (2018) on pregnancy and childbirth, SPILL (2017) by Leigh Fondakowski on the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Boy (2016) by Anna Ziegler on sexual identity, Please Continue (2016) by Frank Basloe on Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments, Informed Consent (2015) by Deborah Zoe Laufer on scientific research and Alzheimer’s, Fast Company (2014) by Carla Ching on game theory and confidence games, Isaac’s Eye (2013) by Lucas Hnath on scientific method and rivalry, and Headstrong (2012) by Patrick Link on sports and concussions.

This year's Artist Cultivation Event panelists include:

Sam Chanse

Sam Chanse’s plays include What you are now (Ensemble Studio Theatre & The Civilians), Disturbance Specialist (The Public Theater & National Asian American Theatre Company’s Out of Time), Trigger (Lark Venturous Fellowship), Fruiting Bodies (Ma-Yi Theater), and Monument, or Four Sisters (A Sloth Play) (Magic Theatre). A resident playwright of New Dramatists, her work has also been developed with Ars Nova (P.S.), Cherry Lane (The Opportunities of Extinction), Playwrights’ Realm (The Other Instinct), New York Stage & Film, Boston Court, the Ojai Playwrights’ Conference, and is published by Kaya Press (Lydia’s Funeral Video) and TCG (The Kilroys List). She is a recipient of a 2024 Bret Adams & Paul Reisch Foundation Vivace Award with collaborators MILCK and AG, and is currently developing a new musical, The Family Album, as a commission of La Jolla Playhouse. Other commissions include EST/Sloan Project, NAATCO, Ars Nova, Workshop Theater, the University of Rochester, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. A former fellow of MacDowell, the Lark Venturous Theater Fund, Cherry Lane, Sundance Theatre Institute, and Playwrights Realm, she is a member of Dramatists Guild and WGAW, and wrote on three seasons of ABC’s The Good Doctor. Proud alum: Ars Nova’s Play Group, Civilians R&D Group, and the Ma-Yi Writers Lab.

Dr. Mandë Holford  Photo Credit: DFinnin_AMNH

Mandë Holford is a Professor in Chemistry at Hunter College and CUNY-Graduate Center, with scientific appointments at The American Museum of Natural History and Weill Cornell Medicine. The Holford Laboratory of Chemical and Biological Diversity demonstrates the scientific path from mollusks to medicine - examining how venoms evolved, developed, and function over time, and how we can use this knowledge as a roadmap for discovering and characterizing peptide natural products with therapeutic potential. She is particularly interested in using venoms and venom peptides to study rapidly evolving genes and to develop invertebrate venom gland model systems that can be genetically manipulated to advance discoveries in novel gene regulation, expression, and function. Her work combines scientific research, education and diplomacy to understand the extraordinary marine biodiversity on our planet and transform this knowledge for the benefit of human and planetary health. She is cofounder of Killer Snails, LLC, an award winning EdTech company that uses tabletop, digital, and XR games as a conduit to advance scientific learning in K-12 classrooms. 

Latif Nasser

Latif Nasser is co-host of the award-winning WNYC Studios show Radiolab, where he has reported stories on everything from snowflake photography to medieval robots to a polar bear who liked to have sex with grizzly bears. He also hosted the award-winning miniseries The Other Latif, about his Moroccan namesake who was Detainee 244 at Guantanamo Bay. In addition to his work in audio, Latif is the host and executive producer of the Netflix science documentary series, Connected.  He has also given two TED talks, and written for the Boston Globe Ideas section. He has a PhD from Harvard's History of Science department.

Dr. Daniela Schiller

Daniela Schiller is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, the Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, and the Friedman Brain Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her research is focused on how the brain represents and modifies emotional memories. Schiller got her PhD in Tel Aviv University where she developed a laboratory model for negative symptoms of schizophrenia. She then continued to do a postdoctoral fellowship at New York University where she examined methods for emotional memory modification in the human brain. Schiller joined Mount Sinai in 2010 and has been directing the affective neuroscience laboratory since. Her lab has delineated the neural computations of threat learning, how the brain modifies emotional memories using imagination, and the dynamic tracking of affective states and social relationships. Schiller’s work has been published in numerous scholarly journals, including Nature, Neuron, Nature Neuroscience, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She is a Fulbright Fellow and a Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow, and has been the recipient of many awards, including the New York Academy of Sciences’ Blavatnik Award, and the Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award in the Neurosciences. 

Lloyd Suh

Lloyd Suh is the author of The Chinese Lady (Ma-Yi at The Public Theater), Bina's Six Apples (Alliance Theatre and Children's Theatre Company), Charles Francis Chan Jr.'s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery, The Wong Kids in the Secret of the Space Chupacabra Go!, Franklinland, and more, including The Heart Sellers, (Milwaukee Rep). His play The Far Country (Atlantic Theatre) was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His work has been produced at theaters across the country, including Ensemble Studio Theatre, Magic Theatre, National Asian American Theatre Company, Denver Center, ArtsEmerson, Long Wharf and others, and internationally at the Cultural Center of the Philippines and with PCPA at the Guerilla Theatre in Seoul, Korea. Awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, Herb Alpert Award, Horton Foote Prize, and Helen Merrill Award. He was elected in 2016 to the Dramatists Guild Council. Starting in 2015, he has been a member of the Dramatists Guild Council. He joined The Lark as the Director of Artistic Programs in 2011. From 2005 to 2010 he was the Artistic Director of Second Generation and Co-Director of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab. He is a member of Ensemble Studio Theatre and an alum of Youngblood and the Soho Rep Writer Director Lab.

About the Moderator

Sophie Bushwick

Sophie Bushwick is a science and technology journalist based in New York City and is currently working as senior news editor at New Scientist. She has more than a decade of experience as a writer and editor at outlets including Scientific American, Popular Science, Discover Magazine and Gizmodo, and she continues to make regular appearances on Science Friday. Her work spans digital and print, podcasts and radio, TV news and TikTok.

Scientist Shree Bose, Director Billy Carden, Playwright Carla Ching, Microbiologist Karine Gibbs join Biologist Stuart Firestein at the 2022 EST/Sloan Artist Cultivation Event on December 5

From left, Shree Bose, Billy Carden, Carla Ching, Karine Gibbs, Stuart Firestein

Playwrights! Join us on Monday, December 5, 2022, at 8:00 PM for the 2022 Virtual EST/Sloan Artist Cultivation Event, the annual far-ranging and free-wheeling discussion among scientists and playwrights about science, story-telling, and what makes plays work. This year’s event will be online and is free for any playwright interested in developing a play about science or technology. Registration is required. Once registered, you will receive the event access link in your confirmation email. You can register here.

WHAT MAKES A GREAT PLAY ABOUT SCIENCE?

“To stimulate artists to create credible and compelling work exploring the worlds of science and technology and to challenge the existing stereotypes of scientists and engineers in the popular imagination.”—this has been the mission of The Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project (EST/Sloan Project, for short) for the past 23 years. Over that time the EST/Sloan Project has awarded more than $3 million in grants to some 300 playwrights and theatre companies. More than 150 productions of EST/Sloan-developed plays have been mounted nationwide.

Applications for this year’s EST/Sloan commissions are currently open and will be accepted through January 15, 2023. You can view previous commission recipients on the EST/Sloan webpage.

Two related events culminate each EST/Sloan season:

1) The First Light Festival is a month-long series of readings and workshops that showcase plays in development, and

2) a full mainstage production of at least one work. Recent mainstage productions have included what you are now (2022) by Sam Chanse about memory and trauma, Behind the Sheet (2019) by Charly Evon Simpson about how American gynecology began with experiments on slaves (a NY Times Critic’s Pick), BUMP by Chiara Atik (2018) on pregnancy and childbirth, SPILL (2017) by Leigh Fondakowski on the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Boy (2016) by Anna Ziegler on sexual identity, Please Continue (2016) by Frank Basloe on Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments, Informed Consent (2015) by Deborah Zoe Laufer on scientific research and Alzheimer’s, Fast Company (2014) by Carla Ching on game theory and confidence games, Isaac’s Eye (2013) by Lucas Hnath on scientific method and rivalry, and Headstrong (2012) by Patrick Link on sports and concussions.

This year's Artist Cultivation Event panelists include

Shree Bose

Shree Bose is currently completing her MD at Duke University School of Medicine. At 17 years old, Shree triumphed over 10,000 competitors to become the Grand Prize Winner of the first-ever Google Global Science Fair in 2011. For her winning research, Shree worked to understand how ovarian cancer cells develop resistance to  a chemotherapy drug called cisplatin. She presented this work to President Obama and directors of the National Institutes of Health, as well as students around the world. Through these experiences, Shree also became a passionate advocate for better STEM education, which led her to co-found Piper Learning, Inc., a company creating educational toys for kids for which she currently serves co-CEO. After graduating Harvard University in 2016, she joined the MD/PhD program at Duke University School of Medicine, where she recently completed her PhD on understanding metabolic changes in ovarian cancer metastasis. She will be completing her MD in May 2023. 

William “Billy” Carden (Photo: Marc J. Franklin)

William “Billy” Carden served as Artistic Director of the Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST) for 15 years (2007-2022). In 2015 EST was given a Special Drama Desk Award for its unwavering commitment to developing new American plays. At EST he directed productions of Against the Hillside by Sylvia Khoury The Good Muslim by Zakiyyah Alexander, Pidgeon, PTSD and Zero by Tommy Smith  and four EST/Sloan productions: Please Continue by Frank Basloe, Headstrong by Patrick Link, Lenin’s Embalmers by Vern Thiessen, and Lucy by Damien Atkins.  He was artistic director of the HB Playwrights Foundation for eleven years where he directed the Off-Broadway productions of Mrs. Klein and Collected Stories starring Uta Hagen.  His many other productions there include Horton Foote’s The Habitation of Dragons, Burnt Piano by Justin Fleming and Voir Dire by Joe Sutton.  He directed The Dew Point at Summer Play Festival, The Young Girl and the Monsoon at Playwrights Horizons, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the Stratford Festival in Canada. As an actor he played leading roles Off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club, Circle Rep, WPA, and EST and also worked at numerous regional theatres including Long Wharf, Hartford Stage, Huntington, Humana Festival, and Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. On Broadway, he created the title role in the original, award-winning production of Short Eyes by Miguel Piñero. He teaches in the acting and playwriting programs at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

Carla Ching

Carla Ching wrote Fast Company as an EST/Sloan commission. It received its New York City premiere in 2014 at the Ensemble Studio Theatre and its World Premiere in 2013 at South Coast Rep. The play has also been published by Samuel French. Her other plays include Revenge Porn or the Story of a Body, Nomad Motel, Sugar House at the Edge of the Wilderness, and The Two Kids That Blow Shit Up. She is a founding member of The Kilroys, a member of New Dramatists, and former Artistic Director of 2g. She was among the first three recipients of the Los Angeles New Play Project Award in 2021. Carla was also a co-recipient of the 2021 Horton Foote Playwriting Award from the Dramatists Guild. Her television credits include Fear the Walking Dead, I Love Dick, The First, Preacher, Home Before Dark, and the forthcoming Mr. + Mrs. Smith.

Karine Gibbs (Photo: Adam Sings in the Timber)

Karine Gibbs is a Jamaican American microbiologist and immunologist and an Associate Professor in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Gibbs’ research merges the fields of sociomicrobiology and bacterial cell biology to explore how the bacterial pathogen Proteus mirabilis, a common gut bacterium which can become pathogenic and cause urinary tract infections, identifies self versus non-self. In 2013, Gibbs and her team were the first to sequence the genome of P. mirabilis BB2000, the model organism for studying self-recognition. In graduate school at Stanford University, Gibbs helped to pioneer the design of a novel tool that allowed for the visualization of the movement of bacterial membrane proteins in real time. In 2020, Gibbs was recognized by Cell Press as one of the top 100 Inspiring Black Scientists in America. 

This year’s moderator

Stuart Firestein

Stuart Firestein is the former Chair of Columbia University's Department of Biological Sciences where his laboratory studies the vertebrate olfactory system, possibly the best chemical detector on the face of the planet. Aside from its molecular detection capabilities, the olfactory system serves as a model for investigating general principles and mechanisms of signaling and perception in the brain. His laboratory seeks to answer that fundamental human question: How do I smell? Dedicated to promoting the accessibility of science to a public audience, Firestein serves as an advisor for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s program for the Public Understanding of Science.  He is the author of Failure: Why Science Is So Successful (2015) and Ignorance: How It Drives Science (2012).

Physicist Brian Greene, Biochemist Mandë Holford, and Playwrights Lucas Hnath and Deb Laufer join Science Editor Steve Mirsky for the November 2 EST/Sloan Artist Cultivation Event

From left: Brian Greene, Mandë Holford, Lucas Hnath, Deb Laufer, Steve Mirsky

WHAT COULD MAKE A GREAT PLAY ABOUT SCIENCE?

“To stimulate artists to create credible and compelling work exploring the worlds of science and technology and to challenge the existing stereotypes of scientists and engineers in the popular imagination.”—this has been the mission of The Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project (EST/Sloan Project, for short) for the past 19 years. Over that time the EST/Sloan Project has awarded more than $3 million in grants to some 300 playwrights and theatre companies. More than 150 productions of EST/Sloan-developed plays have been mounted nationwide. (You can view previous commission recipients on the EST/Sloan web page and submission guidelines here).

Every year the highlight of the EST/Sloan Project submission season (September 1 to December 1) is the Fall Artist Cultivation Event. At this eagerly anticipated event, a panel of scientists, science writers and playwrights engages in a far-ranging and free-wheeling discussion with an audience of prospective playwrights about “what could make a great play about science?” The 2016 Fall Artist Cultivation Event will take place at EST on Thursday, November 2 at 7 PM. The event is free and any playwright interested in developing a play about science or technology is welcome to attend.  

Two related events culminate each EST/Sloan season: 1) The First Light Festival is a month-long series of readings and workshops that showcase plays in development, and 2) a full mainstage production of at least one work. Recent mainstage productions have included SPILL (2017) by Leigh Fondakowski on the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Boy (2016) by Anna Ziegler on sexual identity, Please Continue (2016) by Frank Basloe on Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments, Informed Consent (2015) by Deborah Zoe Laufer on scientific research and Alzheimer’s, Fast Company (2014) by Carla Ching on game theory and confidence games, Isaac’s Eye (2013) by Lukas Hnath on scientific method and rivalry, and Headstrong (2012) by Patrick Link on sports and concussions.

This year's Artist Cultivation Event panelists:

Brian Greene (Photo: Lark Elliott/Vintage Books)

Brian Greene is an American theoretical physicist, mathematician, and string theorist, renowned for his groundbreaking discoveries in superstring theory, including the co-discovery of mirror symmetry and of spatial topology change. He has been a professor at Columbia University since 1996, chairman of the World Science Festival since co-founding it with producer Tracy Day in 2008, and is Director of Columbia University’s Center for Theoretical Physics. He is known to the public through his books, The Elegant Universe, The Fabric of the Cosmos, and The Hidden Reality, which have collectively spent 65 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than 2 million copies worldwide. The Washington Post has called him “the single best explainer of abstruse concepts in the world today.” Professor Greene hosted two Peabody and Emmy Award winning NOVA miniseries based on his books and is a frequent television guest, joining Stephen Colbert seven times and playing himself in an episode of The Big Bang Theory. He has also had cameo roles in a number of Hollywood films including Frequency, Maze and The Last Mimzy.

Mandë Holford (Photo © D. Finnin/AMNH2015)

Chemical biologist Mandë Holford is an Associate Professor in Chemistry at Hunter College and CUNY-Graduate Center, with scientific appointments at the American Museum of Natural History and Weill Cornell Medical College. Her joint appointments reflect her interdisciplinary research, which goes from mollusks to medicine, combining chemistry and biology to discover, characterize, and deliver novel peptides from venomous marine snails as tools for manipulating cellular physiology in pain and cancer. She has received several awards, including being named a New Champion Young Scientist by the World Economic Forum in 2014, the prestigious Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, an NSF CAREER Award, and named a 21st Century Chemist in the NBC-Learn, Chemistry Now series. Dr. Holford is actively involved in science education, advancing the public understanding of science, and science diplomacy. She is co-founder of Killer Snails, a learning games company that uses extreme creatures, like venomous marine snails, as a conduit to advance scientific learning on a global scale. She is also co-founder of RAISE-W (Resource Assisted Initiatives in Science Empowerment for Women), an NSF project to increase the number of women in science. Dr. Holford co-developed a premier Science Diplomacy course at The Rockefeller University to encourage early career scientists to think globally about the impact of their research as it pertains to international relations.

Lucas Hnath (Photo:Tony Cenicola/The New York Times)

Playwright Lucas Hnath is the author of Isaac’s Eye, which EST produced as the 2012 EST/Sloan Mainstage Production and which won the 2012 Whitfield Cook Award. More recently, Lucas wrote A Doll’s House, Part 2, which had its world premiere on Broadway on April 27 of this year and closed September 24 after 30 previews and 173 regular performances at the Golden Theatre. With the original cast featuring Laurie Metcalf, Chris Cooper, Jayne Houdyshell and Condola Rashad, the play garnered eight TONY nominations—the most of any play in the 2016-2017 season—and a Best Actress win for Metcalf as Nora. Lucas’s other plays include A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney, The Christians (which won the 2016 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off Broadway Play and a 2016 Playwriting Obie), and Red Speedo, which also won a 2016 Playwriting Obie. Lucas has been a resident playwright at New Dramatists since 2011 and is Assistant Professor in the Department of Dramatic Writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Deborah Zoe Laufer (Photo: Monica Simoes)

Playwright Deborah Zoe Laufer  is the author of Informed Consent, which EST co-produced as the 2015 EST/Sloan Mainstage Production with Primary Stages at The Duke on 42nd Street to much critical and popular acclaim. In 2017 Informed Consent had productions at the Lantern Theatre in Philadelphia; the Apollinaire Theatre in Chelsea, MA; the American Stage in St. Petersburg, FL; and the GableStage in Coral Gables, FL; and will be produced in March, 2018 at the Unicorn Theatre in Kansas City, MO. Deb is also the author of End Days (EST/Sloan 2009 Mainstage Production and awarded The ATCA Steinberg citation). End Days received a rolling work premiere through the National New Play Network, and went on to receive over 60 productions after that. Her other plays include Be Here Now, Leveling Up, Sirens, Out of Sterno, The Last Schwartz, Meta, The Three Sisters of Weehawken, Fortune, The Gulf of Westchester, Miniatures, and Random Acts. Deb has received the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award and the Lilly Award.

About the moderator

Steve Mirsky

Writer and editor Steve Mirsky has written the “Anti Gravity” column for Scientific American since 1995 and is a member of the magazine’s board of editors. Mirsky launched Scientific American ’s interview-format Science Talk podcast in 2006 and has been hosting it ever since. He also created the daily 60-Second Science podcast, which has also been running since 2006 and has been nominated for a Webby Award.  He has contributed to numerous publications and broadcast outlets, including Audubon; Wildlife Conservation; National Wildlife; Earth; Longevity; The Humanist; Men’s Fitness; American Health; Technology Review; the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Bulletin; Astronomy; New York Newsday; Sea Frontiers; the children’s magazines Current Science, Science World and Muse; National Public Radio; and the Medical News Network.