Sara Bareilles is an award-winning singer, songwriter, actor, producer, activist, and New York Times best-selling author whose accolades to date include two Grammy Awards, three Tony Award nominations, and three Primetime Emmy Award nominations. As a recording artist and songwriter, she has sold more than 3 million albums and 15 million singles in the U.S., and her songs have been streamed more than 3.5 billion times worldwide. On Broadway, she composed music and lyrics for Waitress, stepping into the lead role both on Broadway and in the West End. Other musical theater credits include her Tony-nominated performance as The Baker’s Wife in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods, a song on the Tony Award–nominated score for SpongeBob SquarePants, and an Emmy Award–nominated appearance as Mary Magdalene in NBC's Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert. Bareilles plays Dawn Solano on the Emmy-nominated musical comedy series Girls5eva, the third season of which is streaming now on Netflix, and is currently at work on a musical theater adaptation of Meg Wolitzer’s best-selling novel The Interestings, alongside author Sarah Ruhl.

Cindy Cheung’s many television and film credits include Dying For Sex, The Sinner, The Dinner Plan (upcoming), Love in Taipei, Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens, The Flight Attendant, Billions, Thirteen Reasons Why, High Maintenance, FBI, Blindspot, The Good Fight, Blue Bloods, New Amsterdam, House of Cards, Homeland, Mistress America, Obvious Child, The Light of the Moon, Children of Invention, and Lady in the Water. On stage, Cheung has been seen in The Antiquities, Coach Coach, Merry Me, Catch As Catch Can, Golden Shield, Tiny Beautiful Things, Log Cabin, Iowa, The Great Immensity, Middletown, The Seagull, Antigone, The Sugar House at the Edge of the Wilderness, Sides: The Fear Is Real…, and her self-penned solo show, SPEAK UP CONNIE, directed by BD Wong for the All For One Solo Festival. Cheung is a steering committee member of the Asian American Performers Action Coalition (AAPAC), which received a Tony Honor for Excellence in the Theatre and an Obie Award Special Citation for Advocacy in the Field of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. She has an MFA from A.C.T. and a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from UCLA. Next up is Bus Stop at Classic Stage Company with NAATCO and Transport Group.

Mike Doyle has appeared on screen in New Amsterdam, City on a Hill, The Romanoffs, the Law & Order franchise, The Accidental Wolf, Narcos: Mexico, Jersey Boys, The Invitation, Green Lantern, Fallout, and The Greatest, among others. His stage credits include The New Century at Lincoln Center and Betrayed with the Culture Project. Doyle wrote and directed the feature films Almost Love starring Kate Walsh, Patricia Clarkson, and Scott Evans, and Passing Through, in which he also stars with Kevin Daniels and Amy Ryan. His next film, Bookends, stars F. Murray Abraham and Caroline Aaron.

Maya Hawke is an actor, musician, songwriter, and producer. She made her acting debut in the miniseries adaptation of the classic novel Little Women for PBS in 2018 and has continued to shine on both the big and small screens, in addition to crafting an acclaimed independent music career. She has released three lauded albums of music to date, Moss (2022), Blush (2020), and Chaos Angel (2024), which showcase her natural gift for songwriting. Maya’s acting credits include the critically acclaimed Netflix drama Stranger Things. Dubbed by Entertainment Weekly as the “breakout star,” Hawke became a fan favorite for her performance as Robin Buckley and received an HCA Award Nomination for her performance. Hawke was also in Showtime’s 2020 historical drama The Good Lord Bird alongside her father Ethan Hawke. In 2024, she portrayed “Anxiety” in Disney and Pixar’s Inside Out 2, which became the biggest animated movie of all time, grossing more than 1.5 billion dollars. She stars in and co-produced Ethan Hawke’s biographical film of Flannery O’Connor, Wildcat, which premiered at Telluride Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival in 2023, and was released to wide acclaim in 2024. Maya will be making her Off-Broadway debut in the title role of Signature Theatre's Eurydice, a new play penned by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Les Waters. Past film credits include Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s feature Do Revenge, Human Capital opposite Liev Schreiber and Marisa Tomei, Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Amanda Kramer’s independent film Ladyworld, Gia Coppola's feature film Mainstream, and most recently, Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein drama Maestro. Hawke was included in Variety’s 2022 New Power of New York list, the 2023 Young Hollywood Impact Report, and the 2023 TIME100 Next list.

Jim Parsons recently starred in the Broadway revival of Our Town and the world premiere of Paula Vogel’s Mother Play, also on Broadway, opposite Jessica Lange and Celia Keenan-Bolger. He starred alongside Ben Aldridge in Focus Features’ Spoiler Alert based on Michael Ausiello’s acclaimed memoir of the same title. Other theater includes the Off-Broadway revival of A Man of No Importance for The Classic Stage Company, The Boys in the Band, An Act of God, Harvey, and The Normal Heart. Additional films include A Kid Like Jake; Garden State; Hidden Figures; The Boys in the Band; The Normal Heart; and Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. Parsons played Sheldon Cooper on the TV show The Big Bang Theory for twelve seasons.

Sarah Ruhl is an award-winning American playwright, author, essayist, and professor. Her plays include The Oldest Boy; Dear Elizabeth; Stage Kiss; In the Next Room, or the vibrator play (Pulitzer Prize finalist, 2010); The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize finalist, 2005; Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 2004); Passion Play (Pen American Award, Fourth Freedom Forum Playwriting Award from the Kennedy Center); Dead Man’s Cell Phone (Helen Hayes Award for Best New Play); Melancholy Play; Demeter in the City (nine NAACP Image Award nominations); Scenes From Court Life; How to Transcend a Happy Marriage; For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday; Eurydice; Orlando; and Late, A Cowboy Song. Her plays have been produced on Broadway and across the country as well as internationally, and translated into fourteen languages. Originally from Chicago, Ruhl received her M.F.A. from Brown University, where she studied with Paula Vogel. She is the recipient of a Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a PEN Center Award for mid-career playwrights, a Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, and a Lilly Award. She is a member of 13P and New Dramatists and won the MacArthur Fellowship in 2006. Ruhl teaches at the Yale School of Drama.

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife. She is a faculty member in the Creative Writing and Literature Program at The Lichtenstein Center at Stony Brook University, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a one-year, non-credit intensive for emerging novelists. Wolitzer, who was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, is the radio and podcast host of Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts.

John Atkinson is a voracious reader of cereal boxes, microwave instructions, and subtext. He is the author of Abridged Classics: Brief Summaries of Books You Were Supposed to Read but Probably Didn't, and his cartoon “Wrong Hands” has been featured in numerous online and print publications worldwide.

Elif Batuman’s first novel, The Idiot, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in the United Kingdom. She is also the author of Either/Or, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2022, and The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. Batuman has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010 and holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University.

Michael Cunningham is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Hours, which was adapted into an award-winning film. His works also include the novels Day, A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, Specimen Days, By Nightfall, The Snow Queen, and the short story collection A Wild Swan, as well as the nonfiction Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Redbook, Esquire, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and The Best American Short Stories, among other publications. Cunningham has received the PEN/Faulkner Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he lectures at Yale University.

Ginny Hogan is a New York City–based writer, standup comic, and author of I'm More Dateable than a Plate of Refried Beans: And Other Romantic Observations. She is also the author of Toxic Femininity in the Workplace: Office Gender Politics Are a Battlefield and Sex for Lazy People: 50 Effortless Positions So You Can Do It Without Overdoing It, and is a contributor to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, The Observer, McSweeney's, and Vulture. Forbes recently profiled her as a rising satire star, and she was one of Paste's top humorists of 2019. Hogan performs standup comedy all over the place. She's been seen at The Westside Showdown, The Boston Women in Comedy Festival, San Francisco Sketchfest, the Chicago Women's Funny Festival, the Finger Lakes Festival, and the Park Slope Comedy Festival. She wrote jokes for the 2018 Friar's Club roast of Gloria Allred and has had sketches featured on Comedy Central's digital platform.

Anthony Marra is the New York Times bestselling author of Mercury Pictures Presents, The Tsar of Love and Techno, and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Fiction, and longlisted for the National Book Award. Marra has contributed pieces to The Atlantic, Granta, The Rumpus, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others.