Joshua Cohen and Marisa Michelson

Joshua H. Cohen’s lyrics (and sometimes music or book) include Maggie the Pirate (Winner, Chameleon Theatre Circle; upcoming workshops Momentum Rep, WKU Before Broadway), Tamar and the River (Signature Theatre), Keep On Walkin’ (Amas/Actors’ Harbor), Speargrove Presents (contributing writer; NY Theatre Barn), Still Life With Toe Shoes (workshop, Old Deerfield Productions; production, Musical Theatre Society of Emerson College), The Entropy Songs (Abingdon Theatre; upcoming, Libra Theatre), and The Day the World Went QUEER! (NY Fringe). One-acts: American Globe, Turtle Shell, Prospect, others. 2010 MAC nomination, “Sacrifice of Love.” Plays include full-length Fun and Games (Little Hibiscus) and one-act “Odysseus Swims For It” (publication, Smith & Kraus). Collaborators include composers Marisa Michelson and Lavell Blackwell, playwrights James Armstrong and Jonathan Matthew Gilbert, and singer/essayist/raconteur Brooke Ferris. Managing Director, Blue Room Arts Collective; member of the Dramatists Guild; 2008-10 Fellow, American Lyric Theatre’s Composer-Librettist Development Program. BA: Amherst College, MFA: NYU-GMTWP.

Bio as of March, 2011.

Marisa Michelson composes with a particular emphasis on exploring the voice as a multi-faceted instrument of human expression. Her work includes book and music for Tamar and the River (commissioned by the Signature Theatre thanks to the Shen Family Foundation Next Generation grant, written with Joshua H. Cohen) which had its workshop production last summer and is slated for Signature’s 2012 season; Still Life with Toe Shoes (Old Deerfield Productions; production Musical Theatre Society of Emerson College); Hotel Sarajevo (CAP 21, hotInk Festival, Smith College), and commissioned one-acts for NYC’s Prospect Theatre Company. In May, 2010, Marisa was commissioned with playwright Jason Grote by Montclair University’s New Works Institute to write Scheherezade1001. She is the winner of the 2006 St. Botolph Award for Composition and a Global Arts Village grant to study Indian Hindustani Singing in India. She was a proud participant in the New Dramatists Composer-Librettist Studio, Theatreworks Palo Alto’s 2011 writers residency, and Earthdance’s 2011 “eMerge” interdisciplinary artists residency in Western Massachusetts. Marisa sang with Meredith Monk in Songs of Ascension at BAM, and will be singing in Daria Fain’s Phoneme Choir. She teaches singing through Soyulla artists and privately in Washington Heights.

Bio as of March, 2011.