Lileana Blain-Cruz / Panelist

Lileana Blain-Cruz is a Tony Award-nominated, Obie Award-winning director from New York and Miami. She is a recipient of the Drama League’s Founders Award for Excellence in Directing, and was named a Doris Duke Artist, a Lincoln Center Emerging Artist, and a United States Artists Fellow. Recent projects include: Purple Rain (State Theater, Minneapolis); El Niño (The Metropolitan Opera); The Skin of Our Teeth (Lincoln Center, Tony nomination); Stranger Love (LA Philharmonic); Create Dangerously (Miami New Drama, written and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz); The Listeners (Opera Norway, a new opera by Missy Mazzoli); White Girl in Danger (Second Stage / Vineyard Theatre); Dreaming Zenzile (St. Louis Rep, McCarter Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop / National Black Theatre); Marys Seacole (LCT3, Obie Award); Wayne Shorter and esperanza spalding’s …(Iphigenia) (MASS MoCA, Arts Emerson, The Kennedy Center); Hansel and Gretel (an opera film for Houston Grand Opera); Afrofemononomy (PSNY); Anatomy of a Suicide (Atlantic Theater Company); Fefu and Her Friends (TFANA); Girls (Yale Rep.); Faust (Opera Omaha); Fabulation, Or the Reeducation of Undine (Signature Theatre); Thunderbodies and Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. (Soho Rep.); The House That Will Not Stand and Red Speedo (NYTW); Water by the Spoonful (Mark Taper Forum/CTG); Pipeline (Lincoln Center); The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (Signature Theatre, Obie Award); Henry IV, Part One and Much Ado About Nothing (Oregon Shakespeare Festival); The Bluest Eye (The Guthrie); War (LCT3/Lincoln Center Theater and Yale Rep.); Salome (JACK); Hollow Roots (the Under the Radar Festival at The Public Theater). She received her BA from Princeton and her MFA in directing from the Yale School of Drama, where she received both the Julian Milton Kaufman Memorial Prize and the Pierre-Andre Salim Prize for her leadership and directing.

James C Nicola / Panelist

James C. Nicola was the Artistic Director of New York Theatre Workshop from 1988–2022. Under his guidance, NYTW has remained steadfast to its founding commitment of nurturing emerging, mid-career and established theatre artists and promoting collaboration and bold experimentation with theatrical forms.

Before joining NYTW, Jim spent seven years at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., first as a National Endowment for the Arts Directing Fellow and later as a Producing Associate, where he directed productions including Marsha Norman’s ‘night Mother, Christopher Durang’s The Marriage of Bette and Boo, and Emily Mann’s Still Life. Mr. Nicola’s other directing credits include Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti and Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury at the WPA Theatre, John Guare’s Landscape of the Body at the Studio Theatre, and Ernest Joselovitz’s Flesh Eaters and Jessie’s Land at the New Playwrights Theatre.

From 1975 to 1980, Jim was a Casting Coordinator for the New York Shakespeare Festival, where he developed his continuing, passionate commitment to new voices in the theatre. Jim fueled his love of theatre during the early 1970s, when he was an Assistant Director at The Young Vic/National Theatre of Great Britain and an Assistant Stage Manager at London’s Royal Court Theatre. Jim is a graduate of Tufts University and is a recipient of Tufts University’s P.T. Barnum Award, the Erwin Piscator Award, and the 2015 Miss Lilly Award for supporting women in theater.