PRESIDENT AND CHAIR

Christine Toy Johnson is a Tony and Obie honored, Rosetta LeNoire, JACL, Actors’ Equity Foundation, and Asian American Arts Alliance award winning writer, actor, and advocate for inclusion. Her written work has been produced and/or developed by the Roundabout, Village Theatre, O’Neill Center, the Abingdon, Greater Boston Stage Company, Florida Studio Theatre, Ars Nova, Barrow Group, Prospect Theatre, Weston Playhouse, Musical Theatre West, Goodspeed Opera House, and more, and is included in the Library of Congress’s Asian Pacific American Playwrights Collection. Published by NoPassport Press, Smith & Kraus, Rowman & Littlefield, Applause Books. Award winning films include the documentary feature “Transcending: the Wat Misaka Story” and musical short “Riding Out the Storm”. Treasurer of the Dramatists Guild, President and Chair of the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund, host of the Guild’s podcast "Talkback" on Broadway Podcast Network. BMI, Writers Lab, Sarah Lawrence College alum, co-founder of AAPAC (Asian American Performers Action Coalition), founder of the Asian American Theatre Artists Collective. As an actor, Christine has appeared extensively on Broadway, Off-Broadway, in regional theatres across the country and on television and film. Details: www.christinetoyjohnson.com

BOARD MEMBER

John Weidman has written the books for a wide variety of musicals, among them Pacific Overtures, Assassins and Road Show, all with scores by Stephen Sondheim; Contact, co-created with director/choreographer Susan Stroman; Happiness, score by Scott Frankel and Michael Korie, directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman; Take Flight and Big, scores by Richard Maltby Jr. and David Shire; and the new book, co-authored with Timothy Crouse, for the Lincoln Center Theater revival of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, a new production of which, produced by the Roundabout Theatre, recently ran on Broadway at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre. Since his children were pre-schoolers, Weidman has written for Sesame Street, receiving more than a dozen Emmy Awards for Outstanding Writing for a Children’s Program. From 1999 to 2009 he served as President of the Dramatists Guild of America.

Cheryl Davis has received three Writers’ Guild Awards for her work on the daytime dramatic serials As the World Turns and Days of Our Lives, and is currently on the writing team for Beyond the Gates, the first new network soap in decades. She was also nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award for Days, as well as for As the World Turns). She has written for Law & Order: SVU and her episode “Garland’s Baptism by Fire” is available on Peacock On Demand.  Her short play Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep streamed as part of #WhileWeBreathe and received a write-up in the New York Times.

Cheryl received the Ed Kleban Award for her work as a musical theater librettist, and her musical Barnstormer, written with award-winning composer Douglas J. Cohen, received a Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation Award under the auspices of the Lark Play Development Center. Her play Maid’s Door was produced at the Billie Holiday Theatre, received seven Audelco Awards, and was presented at the 2015 and 2017 National Black Theatre Festivals, and was published in Holy Ground: The National Black Theatre Festival Anthology. Her musical Bridges was commissioned and produced by the Berkeley Playhouse and received great reviews, including from the San Francisco Examiner; it was a finalist for the 2018 Richard Rodgers Award.  Don’t Stay Safe, the short film musical based on Bridges, was nominated for a Drama Desk Award and screened and won awards in several film festivals. She is the co-librettist for a new version of Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha, received its world premiere in Toronto in June 2023 to great reviews (including a writeup in the New York Times as a Best Classical Music Performance of 2023); it was recently nominated for 11 Dora Mavor Moore Awards in the Opera Category.

Cheryl’s play about the desegregation of the nation’s school system, The Color of Justice, which was commissioned by Theatreworks/USA, received excellent reviews in the New York Times and Daily News, and toured for a number of years. Her play Winnie the Pooh KIDS was commissioned and is currently licensed by the Disney Theatrical Group. Her play Cover Girls, which is an adaptation of the Bishop T. D. Jakes novel, was produced and toured by ClearChannel Entertainment. She has written commissions for the Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science and Technology Project, the Red Mountain Theatre Company (Mandela and The MLK Project), and the Birmingham Children’s Theatre (Tuxedo Junction, about Alabama Jazz musician Erskine Hawkins).

Cheryl is a librettist and lyricist and is an alumna of the Advanced Workshop of the BMI/Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop.  She has a degree in English and a Certificate in Theatre and Dance from Princeton University and has studied playwriting with Jean-Claude Van Itallie and Jeffrey Sweet. She is a former Dramatists Guild Fellow, having been mentored by playwright/librettist Alfred Uhry. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild and a Board member of the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund.

She received her J.D. from Columbia University School of Law and her M.S.J. from the Columbia University School of Journalism. She is a practicing attorney in Manhattan and is the General Counsel for the Authors Guild.

Diana Burbano, a Colombian immigrant, is a playwright, an Equity actor, and a teaching artist at South Coast Repertory and Breath of Fire Latina Theatre Ensemble.
Diana’s play Ghosts of Bogotá won the Nu Voices festival at Actors Theatre of Charlotte in 2019. Ghosts was commissioned and debuted at Alter Theater in the Bay Area in Feb 2020. Sapience was a Playground-SF 2020, Winner and was featured at Latinx Theatre Festival, San Diego Rep 2020. Fabulous Monsters, a Kilroys selection will premiere at The Public Theatre of San Antonio, featuring the music of FEA in 2023.
Diana was in Center Theatre Group’s 2018-19 Writers Workshop cohort and is in the Geffen’s Writers Lab in 20-21. She has worked on projects with South Coast Repertory, Artists Repertory Theatre, Breath of Fire Latina Theatre Ensemble and Center Theatre Group, and Livermore Shakespeare Festival. As an actor, Diana recently played Amalia in Jose Cruz Gonzales' American Mariachi at South Coast Repertory and Arizona Theatre Company, and Marisela in La Ruta at Artists Repertory.
You can also see her as Viv the Punk in the cult musical Isle of Lesbos.
She is the current Dramatists Guild Rep for Southern California.

Kia Corthron is a playwright and novelist.

She is the author of numerous plays, which have been produced in New York, across the U.S., and internationally. Awards for her body of work for the stage include the Windham Campbell Prize for Drama, the Horton Foote Award, the Flora Roberts Award, the United States Artists Jane Addams Fellowship, the Otto Award for Political Theatre, the Simon Great Plains Playwright Award, and the Lee Reynolds Award. She has also written a little television: for David Simon's The Wire (Edgar and Writers Guild Outstanding Series awards) and Tom Fontana's The Jury.

In 2016, Kia's debut novel, The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter, was published by Seven Stories Press. It was named a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and was awarded The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her second novel, Moon and the Mars, was released in 2021.

In 2018, she partnered with playwright Naomi Wallace, director Kevin Hourigan, Theater Three Collaborative, and New York Rep to produce IMAGINE: YEMEN, an evening of short plays addressing the catastrophe in Yemen and U.S. responsibility for it. Her own contribution was a nine-minute musical, the main song later animated by Charlotte Lesnick. It was screened in London at the United Nations Association-UK's We The People's Film Festival and is available on YouTube.

She has taught writing to incarcerated youth and adults, death row exonerees, veterans, the chronically ill, university students, and others.

Her writing-related travels include a two-week residency in Liberia as the country was transitioning out of its civil war under the auspices of a Guthrie Theater travel/play commissioning grant; a week in the West Bank and Gaza as part of a six-member American playwright contingent to meet with Palestinian theatre artists (with colleagues Robert O'Hara, Tony Kushner, Lisa Schlesinger, Betty Shamieh, and Naomi Wallace); and two weeks in Kimberley and Cape Town, South Africa, meeting with South African township writers, students, and others as part of a reading tour delegation organized by the University of Iowa's International Writing Program.

Corthron has lived in New York City since 1988, most of that time in Harlem.

David Henry Hwang’s stage works include the plays M. Butterfly, Yellow Face, Golden Child, Chinglish, and The Dance and the Railroad, as well as the musicals Soft Power, Flower Drum Song, and Disney’s Broadway & international hits Aida and Tarzan. The 2024  revival of Yellow Face, starring Daniel Dae Kim, enjoyed a critically-acclaimed Tony Award-winning run on Broadway, and was broadcast on PBS’ Great Performances. Called America’s most-produced living opera librettist by Opera News, Hwang has written thirteen operas, including five with Philip Glass and four with Huang Ruo. Ainadamar, with music by Osvaldo Golijov, made its Metropolitan Opera debut in Fall 2024 and The Monkey King, with music by Huang Ruo, premiered at San Francisco Opera in November 2025. Hwang’s screenplays include David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly, starring Jeremy Irons and John Lone, and he is currently penning an Anna May Wong biopic to star Gemma Chan as well as a musical feature film for Paramount Pictures. Hwang co-wrote the Gold Record “Solo” with the late pop music icon Prince and was a Writer/Consulting Producer for the Golden Globe-winning television series The Affair from 2015-2019.

He  is a Tony Award winner and four-time nominee, a Grammy Award winner and three-time nominee, a three-time OBIE Award winner, and a three-time Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. A professor emeritus at Columbia University School of the Arts, he was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 2018 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021. In 2025, Hwang received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Dramatists Guild of America.

For more than a decade, Rachel Routh has shaped and developed the Dramatist Guild Foundation as Executive Director, transforming and accelerating the scope and impact of the organization.

Under her leadership, DGF has become a national leader supporting and funding playwrights, composers, lyricists, and librettists. An accomplished team builder, her forward-thinking and collaborative approach has led to local and nationwide initiatives providing direct resources to dramatists so they can create their life changing art.

Thanks to this growth, DGF now provides more than $1 Million annually in awards, grants, and stipends to dramatists and saves writers more than $1 Million annually via its free rehearsal spaces. Working with the Board, Routh has championed financial stability for DGF, so that the future of this important work can continue. This work includes critical investment in all the voices that make up the American Theater and a commitment to creating safe spaces for artists to create.

Routh came to the Foundation after working as a non-profit and commercial arts consultant in management, marketing and fundraising. Through her own firm, she has worked with writers and non-profit organizations to produce films, special events and performances throughout New York City. Routh also has a background in commercial theater production with Amanda Lipitz Productions.

She received her undergraduate degree from DePauw University and her M.S. in Nonprofit Management from Columbia University. A certified fundraising executive (CFRE), Rachel also completed INSEAD’s Management Acceleration Programme.

Ralph Sevush, Esq., is an entertainment attorney. He’s been with The Dramatists Guild of America since 1997, and their Co-Executive Director and general counsel since June 2005. After college (SUNY at Stony Brook, 1983), he began a career in the film industry with Cinema 5 films and New Line Cinema, working in motion picture marketing, distribution, and script development. After law school (Cardozo School of Law, 1991), he worked with Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, Reiss Media Entertainment, International Media Investors and Sony Pictures.

Then, as Director of Business Affairs for Fremont Associates/Pachyderm Entertainment, he began his career in the Theater with the Broadway productions of BIG the Musical, Bill Irwin & David Shiner’s Fool Moon, Julia Sweeney’s God Said, 'HA!' and the off-Broadway & L.A. productions of Claudia Shear’s Blown Sideways Through Life. Since coming to the Dramatists Guild, in addition to administering the organization and advising the Guild’s membership and its council, he has co-authored numerous amicus briefs, and provided expert testimony, in a range of cases affecting playwrights. He has also authored over 70 articles on the theater industry for The Dramatist magazine, as well as hosting seminars and workshops for writers. He founded The Dramatists Legal Defense Fund in 2012 to support the Guild’s efforts in defense of free speech and copyright protection.