[RE]PUBLIC

Sophie Kim is an award-winning playwright, lyricist/librettist, performance poet, filmmaker, and producer from Los Angeles, CA. Kim was the 2018 Los Angeles County Youth Poet Laureate and is the author of SING THE BIRDS HOME (2019, Penmanship Books). Kim is a senior at Harvard College studying gender studies and theater.

Kim is the lyricist/librettist and executive producer of ISCARIOT: THE MUSICAL, which had its world premiere at the Agassiz Theatre at Harvard College in December 2022. Kim is co-lyricist/librettist of THE FORTUNATES, which had its virtual world premiere at the Harvard ARTS FIRST Festival in April 2021. Kim is the lyricist/librettist of ARE YOU HAPPY?, a new musical that was produced (in excerpted form) at the 2022 Harvard Playwrights Festival and is currently in development.

Kim received the 2022 Phyllis Anderson Prize for Playwriting from the American Repertory Theater for SWAN, a play. SWAN premiered in the 2023 Moonbox Productions’ Boston New Works Festival (directed by Kai Chao and assistant directed by Vinny Douglass). SWAN was previously developed in the inaugural Theater Offensive Emergent Artist Residency Cohort, an 18-month program of artistic and professional development for QTPOC artists, and had a work-in-progress showing in March 2023. Kim was a 2022 summer production & dramaturgy intern at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, M.A.

Boston-native, Vashanti Cowan (she/they), is a self-taught “artivist” who devices performance art for her own spiritual fulfillment through a community activism and social justice lens. Vashanti’s artistic journey began as an active ensemble member of The Theater Offensive’s (TTO) True Colors Troupe. Performance credits include Sugar Spice and Everything Queer, and Traveler’s Guide to Self Love. She has also been an active member of the True Colors Creative Action Crew, Youth Advisory Board, and is the current Queer Republic’s Artist in Residence. Through their residency, Vashanti will be exploring and devising a self-performed piece combining dance, psychology, and somatic/embodied movement into their own personal aesthetic. Vashanti is the honoree for TTO’s 2021 Beyond the Stage Youth Resident Artist Award. Vashanti wants to thank the universe, family, & chosen family for their unconditional love and support.

Adil Mansoor is a theatre director centering the stories of queer folks and people of color. His performance “Amm(i)gone” adapts Sophocles’s “Antigone” as an apology to and from his mother. “Amm(i)gone” is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creative and Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Kelly Strayhorn Theater, The Theater Offensive, and NPN.

Mansoor has developed work with New York Theatre Workshop, Woolly Mammoth, The Poetry Project, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Tofte Lake Center, NYU Tisch, PearlArts Studios, and others. Recent directing projects include “Daddies” by Paul Kruse (Audible), "Gloria" by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Hatch Arts Collective), "Kentucky" by Lean Nanoko Winkler (Pittsburgh Playhouse), and “Once Removed” by Paul Kruse (Tribeca).

Mansoor is a founding member of Pittsburgh’s Hatch Arts Collective and the former Artistic Director of Dreams of Hope, an LGBTQA+ youth arts organization. He has been an NYTW 2050 Directing Fellow, a Gerri Kay New Voices Fellow with Quantum Theater, and an Art of Practice Fellow and Community Leader with Sundance. He was part of the inaugural Artist Caucus gathered by Baltimore Center Stage, Long Wharf, The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, and Woolly Mammoth. Mansoor received his MFA in Directing from Carnegie Mellon.