Meet the Playwrights

JOYCE FONTANA is the 2024 Bradford Gromelski Jury Award winning playwright. Bradford was a past juror of The Seven, a past FUSION main stage director, and a Professor Emeritus/playwright at Iona College in New York. Now deceased, he was the father of company co-founder Dennis Gromelski.

JOYCE FONTANA, PhD, has had short plays as Finalists in Play Festivals across the U.S.: Productions in Durango and Cortez CO; Manhattan and Queens, NY; and Houston TX; Readings: in Princeton IL, Burnsville MN, Valdez AK, Gulf Shores AL, Sarasota, FL. and Kainaliu, Hawaii. Zoom readings produced in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Long Island, NY. Two short plays have been published. Joyce lives with husband and two dogs in beautiful Southwest Colorado, USA. She identifies as a Senior Citizen, who discovered the satisfying pastime of playwriting as she approached retirement from five decades in healthcare. She is inspired by and committed to creating drama which reflects human conditions and experiences shared by a broad spectrum of audiences without specific attention to ideologies nor demographics. Thus, she has brought to the stage themes including the opiate epidemic, the psychedelic drug renaissance, family ancestry searches, the Imposter Syndrome, celestial phenomena and, most recently, earworms!

GUY R. NEWSHAM spent a career working on making buildings more energy efficient and sustainable.  He has acted on community theatre stages for many years, and started writing for the stage in earnest seven years ago.  His plays have been successful in multiple competitions and festivals, leading to more than ninety prizes and productions in five countries.  He is a member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada, and in 2021 he won Canada’s National One Act Playwriting Competition.

CHERIELYN FERGUSON is thrilled to be one of The Seven! A San Francisco Bay Area playwright, Cherielyn’s plays have been produced and read at PlayGround-SF, Fargo Moorhead Community Theatre, Pan Theatre, Shawnee Playhouse, Chameleon Theatre Circle, Adams State University, Monster Box Theatre, Quannapowitt Players, The Storefront Theatre, Australia’s Gemco Players, and at The Lantern Theatre in Sheffield, UK, among others. Her most recent production was at The Pear Theatre in its Pear Slices New Works Festival. She’s a member of the Dramatists Guild, Theatre Bay Area, Berkeley’s Play Café, the Playwrights Center, the Pear Playwrights’ Guild, The Playwrights' Center of San Francisco, and PlayGround-SF’s 2023-24 writers pool. She is an alumna of the Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive.

CURT STRICKLAND is a playwright who recently received a masters degree in playwriting from Lesley University’s graduate program. Inspired by August Wilson, Curt is finishing up his fifth play in a ten-play opus on America, each play set in a different decade. Besides his political and cultural essays, Curt is a landscape photographer, and a former owner at Great American Art, one of the largest commercial art corporations in the nation. Curt believes that Art should serve to heal, inspire, provoke, challenge and to offer hope—but most of all to connect, to remind us of our common humanity. In 2020, Curt received a double lung transplant, an event that had profound effects on both his writing and his life. This experience is the basis of a new play he is developing called Double Lung. 

LISA DELLAGIARINO FERIEND is an award-winning playwright, a member of the Dramatists Guild, and President of the Board of Arts For All, a NYC-based nonprofit bringing accessible artistic opportunities to children who face barriers to exploring the arts. She has a BFA in Film & TV from NYU and two kids who are disappointed that she doesn't write plays about dinosaurs.

REX MCGREGOR is a New Zealand playwright. His short comedies have been produced on four continents from New York and London to Sydney and Chennai. To learn more about his extensive accomplishments visit his website at RexMcGregor.com.

A queer playwright and daughter of an Argentine immigrant, ANNE VALENTINO holds a PhD in Literature and is based in the Washington DC area. Notable plays include You Welcome (2024 Finalist, The Road Theatre Company’s Summer Playwright Festival), The Dresses (2024 Finalist, Cincinnati Lab Theater’s New Works Festival), The Boxes We Keep (2023 Winner, Lesbian Thespians’ Playwriting Contest; 2024 Production ArtServe), The Couple on the Couch (2023 Finalist, Larking House Playwright Intensive and Pegasus PlayLab), The Only Light We’ll See (2024 Finalist, Room of One’s Own Residency, The Bechdel Project), FACSIMILE (2024 Finalist, Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival), In a Margaret Atwood Minute…Or, The Book Bitch (2024 Overtime Theatre), “You Asked” (VetRep’s 10-Minute Play Festival), “The Legend of Cake Mama Lives On” (One-Act Slam, StageWorks at Studio 237), and The The (The Aphra Behn Festival, SATE Ensemble Theatre). Anne is a Dramatists Guild member and a member of Honor Roll.