Class of 2025
Aisha Hamid is a poet and writer from Lahore, Pakistan. She was shortlisted by the Zeenat Haroon Rashid Writing Prize for Women, 2019, and received an honorable mention by The Berlin Writing Prize 2019. She is a Poetry Reader at The Adroit Journal, a fellow at Qalambaaz 2023, Pakistan’s first screenwriting lab, and an alum of the South Asian Write Beyond Borders mentorship program, 2021, and the LUMS Young Writers’ Workshop ’19. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Vallum Magazine, The Aleph Review, Yoda Press, and elsewhere. Her writing centers around South Asian women’s lived experiences, their agency and the multiple meanings it holds for them, as well as mental illness, generational trauma, and sisterhood.
Frank Garland is a playwright and performer, originally from Seattle.
He graduated in 2020 with a BA in English and a minor in Theater from Harvard University. He loves improv comedy and roleplaying games and all things playing pretend. His plays have been staged and workshopped in Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, and often explore themes of escapism and performativity and the ways the people we pretend to be reveal things about the people we are. He spends his free time reading fantasy novels and listening to old union songs.
Elliot Schiff is a playwright and comedian from Los Angeles, California. Based in Chicago, Elliot has two pet rabbits.
Tiana Williams is a writer, filmmaker, and performer from Kansas City, Missouri. She earned a BFA in filmmaking from Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri in 2018. Since graduating, Tiana has found herself dipping into different industries from education to business administration trying to find where she fits. Ultimately, nothing compared to her love for writing and she was compelled to answer the call to create. Tiana has always found a sense of security on the page. Writing helps her understand herself and the world better. In her work, Tiana aims to stir empathy with complex characters that remind us we are more alike than different, and therefore encourage social change. She believes art is a great instrument to not only provoke us to do better, but also to invite us to find joy and spread it. When Tiana isn’t musing over the perfect word pairing, she can be found somewhere cackling at her own jokes…then writing it down – lol.
Class of 2026
Rachel Chin is a Malaysian-born writer and actor. She lived in Singapore for ten years before relocating to the United States. Her first full-length play, Expats Anonymous, tackled systemic classism and racism in Singapore, and was produced by the Yale Cabaret. Rachel’s plays have been commissioned by The Theatre of Others, MoreLife Theatre, The Wright Stuff Festival by The Toy Factory, and the Singapore International Festival of the Arts (SIFA X). She has also written for the MeWATCH Interactive TV Series, Adulting, and is a founding member of the sketch comedy group, Otters United FC. Rachel’s work often personalises the political, and she prides herself on finding levity in divisive themes. She was a resident of Centre 42’s Playwright’s Professional Development Residency and graduated from LASALLE College of the Arts with first-class honours in Acting. You can learn more about her work on her website, www.rachel-chin.com.
Abdeljaleel Ismail is a Sudanese American writer and filmmaker who graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Applied Mathematics and English. He hails from Marietta, Ohio — a small town on the Ohio River where his identity was such an outlier, it led to a deep exploration of pop culture, film, and narratives throughout his adolescence. This led Abdeljaleel to make a hobby out of writing himself. After working at HBO Max on the technical side of things, Ismail decided to pursue his creative passions and pivoted to podcast development and production at Spotify. Prior to pursuing his MFA in Writing for Screen and Stage at Northwestern University, Abdeljaleel spent 18 months on the Film Production Finance team at Netflix.
His own work often reflects on identity, mental health, and exaggerated experiences he observes from family and friends. Stories of familial drama, coming of age, and characters that avoid responsibility at all cost excite him.
Amy B Tiong is a Chinese-American director and screenwriter. Inspired by her immigrant parents, she devoted herself to her love of learning, becoming a Gates Millennium Scholar and NYU Tisch Dean’s Scholar. She believes in showing solidarity on-screen and using film as a medium of generational healing; she aims to inspire empathy through genre-bending storytelling. Her feature script, When You’re Ready To Go, a horror immigration story, was in the top 3% of scripts on Coverfly, making it to the finalist rounds of WeScreenplay, Stowe Story Labs, and Screen Craft Competitions. She has directed short films with The Dolby Institute, Ghetto Film School, Bustle Media, PictureStart, Wavelength Productions, and The NAACP. Outside of her film career, she enjoys boxing, reading, dancing, baking, and serving her community. Additionally, she holds a Master’s degree in Human Nutrition. Her website can be found at amybtiong.com
Morgan Webber-Ottey is a writer and recovering lawyer. After discovering that there’s a lot less “trial strategy over takeout” in the real world than shown on TV, she made the difficult decision to hang up her litigator hat and swap one form of self-flagellation for another: writing darkly satirical dramas. Her character-driven writing centers deeply flawed women of color who are misfits and underdogs.
Morgan is a recipient of the Hansberry-Lilly Fellowship (The Dramatists Guild Foundation/The Lillys), a selected fellow for the NHMC’s Series Scriptwriters Program (sponsored by NBC and Disney/ABC), and a Stowe Story Labs/SAGindie Fellowship winner. She is an alum of the Writers Guild Foundation’s Writers’ Access Support Staff Training Program, a second rounder in the Warner Bros. TV Writers’ Workshop, and she previously worked as the Script Coordinator on the final, 20-episode season of Manifest, on Netflix.