(JERSEY CITY, NJ) – Art House Productions has announced the 2022-2023 cohort of its INKubator Program. INKubator is a year-long new play process for a select group of 6 New Jersey-Associated playwrights in residence at Art House Productions. This year's playwrights are Micharne Cloughley, Amir-Gabriel Gad, Adin Lenahan, Iraisa Ann Reilly, Edwin Rivera-Arias, and Emmy Weissman.

Playwrights will meet on a monthly basis alongside program director Alex Tobey to share new work, receive feedback, and develop a first draft of a new play. In the spring, each writer will team up with a director and actors to present a public reading as a part of Art House Productions' 5th Annual INKubator New Play Festival scheduled for May 2023. Audiences who attend the festival will have the opportunity to participate in conversations with the writers, directors, and actors following each performance.

“After two years of collaborating remotely, I can’t wait to sit around a table with this cohort and build new plays in person! This year’s cohort and their plays have strong local ties, so it feels especially fitting that we are gathering in Art House’s brand new home in downtown Jersey City,” says INKubator Program Director Alex Tobey.

INKubator playwrights will be the first cohort with access to Art House Productions’ new space inside the Hendrix, on Marin Boulevard between Bay Street and Morgan Street. In addition to official INKubator programming, playwrights will also have the ability to utilize the space for meetings, rehearsals, and readings.

Submissions were evaluated through a process coordinated by INKubator Program Director, Alex Tobey, in partnership with INKubator alumni playwrights Maddie Dennis-Yates and Christian Mendonça, and Art House Productions’ Meredith Burns. 

The following finalists were also honored in this year’s submission process: Eric Craft, Gina Femia, Justin Halle, James La Bella, Dave Osmundsen and Camille Thomas.

Meredith Burns, Executive Artistic Director of Art House Productions, says, “This year’s INK cohort reflects the talent and diversity of New Jersey. Each of the six playwrights is deeply connected to our state, and the work they create throughout the next 9 months will reflect that. We’re proud to represent this side of the river and we’re grateful to all the artists who feel similarly.”

Art House Productions is generously supported by The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, SILVERMAN, public funds from the Jersey City Arts and Culture Trust Fund, The Princeton Area Community Foundation, The New Jersey Theatre Alliance, The Hudson County Office of Cultural Affairs, The KRE Group, CoolVines, and the Alliance of Resident Theatres / New York. 

Art House Productions is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization committed to the development and presentation of the performing and visual arts in Jersey City, NJ. Art House Productions presents performing and visual arts festivals, arts events, visual art exhibitions, and adult and youth art classes  

2022-2023 INKubator Writers 

Micharne Cloughley was head writer for The Way They Live, and co-wrote The End and the Beginning, which were performed in The Metropolitan Museum of Art and produced by The Civilians, the first theatre company in residence in the museum. She was awarded the Creative Arts Fellowship at the National Library of Australia, where she wrote A Dream Panel of Real Women using the archives of Hazel de Berg, a pioneer oral historian. The play was further developed at the Spark Youth Theatre in Ashfield, Australia, and at The Tank in NYC. Other plays include 43 Stages of Grieving, 99 Phone Calls You Shouldn’t Have Made, You and U.S., Not That Kind of Doll, and One Flesh.  Her work has been developed or presented in New York by the Australian Theatre Festival, The 24 Hour Plays, Judson Memorial Church, Animus Theatre Company, Australian Made Entertainment, and NYC Playwrights, and in Australia by the Brisbane Sci-Fi Theatre Festival, Holden Street Theatres, Tamarama Rock Surfers, Baggage Productions, and Q Theatre. As a screenwriter, Micharne was story editor and staff writer for seasons 21 - 23 of Law & Order: SVU. She began her career as a development producer and researcher, for both scripted and unscripted projects in film and television. She has over 10 years of experience in development, production and casting, working for international companies including Eyeworks, Endemol, Fremantle Media, and Indievillage. Micharne holds a Graduate Diploma of Dramatic Art in Playwriting from the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) and Bachelor of Arts (Television Production) from Charles Sturt University. 

Amir-Gabriel Gad (they/he) is a playwright, visual artist, and final boy of a late 90s slasher born and raised in Central Jersey. They have recently graduated from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia with a BFA in Directing, Playwriting, and Production. His work is currently being developed at The Workshop Theater. They collage the unnatural with real life, questioning language, genre, comfort, and discomfort. He's currently fascinated with magic eight balls and ornithology.

Adin Lenahan (they/them) is a writer, performer, and producer.  Adin makes theater about losers, the kinds of people who can’t even pull it together to make themselves look cool on Instagram, but whose depth of experience could fill a million feeds and timelines.  Their work has been produced at Ars Nova, Dixon Place, Judson Memorial Church, The Kraine, The New Ohio, The Tank, Theater for the New City, Tom Noonan’s Paradise Factory, and wild project, among other venues.  They are a producer with the Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary arts incubator, Undiscovered Countries (UC).

Iraisa Ann Reilly (she/ella) is a Jersey-born artist with a passion for writing bilingual stories that address social concerns. Select full-length plays include Good Cuban Girls (Teatro del Sol at Arden Theatre Company), The Jersey Devil is a Papi Chulo (SolFest 2022, Yale Drama Series Shortlist 2022, KCACTF), Saturday Mourning Cartoons (Winner, Bay Area Playwright’s Festival 2022; Finalist, Goldberg Playwriting Prize 2022), One Day Old (Philadelphia Fringe, New York Classical Theatre Finalist, Rorschach Theatre Finalist), and A Beginner’s Guide to Interpreting Aphasia (writer/performer, Philadelphia’s SoLow Fest). Her work has been developed with Theatre Exile, The New Harmony Project, The Chain Theatre, and the Latinx Playwright’s Circle. She was commissioned by Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi to write a play about Mexican American Civil Rights activist Dr. Hector P. Garcia, which will be produced by the university this fall. Iraisa Ann was semifinalist for the Page 73 Fellowship in 2019 and a Development Screenwriting Studio Fellow in 2021 with NYU’s Production Lab, where she wrote her original screenplay, La Reina Del Bronx (Winner, Fusion Film Festival). MFA in Dramatic Writing, NYU. BA in Theatre and English, University of Notre Dame.  

Edwin Rivera-Arias is a Colombian-Cuban playwright and fiction writer. His first play, In the Palace of the Planet King, was produced in 2019 at The Wild Project in NYC as part of the Downtown Urban Arts Festival. He was a Norman Mailer Fiction Fellow and a recipient of the Willapa Bay AiR residency. He is currently in residence at the New Jersey Play Lab, where his full-length dramatic work Come Rain, Come Hurricane is in development.

Emmy Weissman is a writer, costume designer, and teaching artist based in NYC. Her plays include Sugar (The Makers’ Ensemble Short Play Fest) and Motherf**king Girl Scouts (All Out Arts's Fresh Fruit Festival at The Wild Project, Smith & Kraus WE-US: Monologues for Gender Minority Characters). BFA in Drama - NYU Tisch.