THE PLAYWRIGHTS COLLECTIVE
CURRENT RESIDENTS
Esther Yumi Ko majored in English/Creative Writing at Hunter College, where she discovered TV writing and theatre in her senior year. Since then she’s dived into New York theatre, especially experimental, site-specific, interactive, and devised works.
She co-wrote her first full-length play, Clickbait: A High-Tech, Low-Tech Love Story About Sex, Suicide, and Cell Phones which won the Andrew and Eleanor McGlinchee Prize in Playwriting and was produced at The Access Theater. It asked audience members to keep their cell phones on and interact with the characters’ feeds, pics, and tweets throughout the show. Her short works have been seen in AA Runs on Shorts; Our Bar; the Canton One-Act Festival; and A Sunnyside Mixtape. She is the co-founder of the Fail Better Reading Series, a weekly reading series for writers and actors.
Christopher Torres is a Queens bred, Ecuadorian-American storyteller. He studied creative writing at John Jay College of Criminal Justice while pretending to study for his forensic psychology degree. He is currently an MFA candidate at City College. He is also an editorial assistant for J Journal: New Writing on Justice, the co-creator of the weekly Fail Better Reading Series and performs at storytelling open mics throughout NYC. In February, his short play, We Come Here, was featured in Astoria Stories, produced by the Astoria Performing Arts Center. This April he will perform in The Debates (Theater in Asylum). His next project is a site-specific hip-hopera with Sunnyside Shines.
Ray Yamanouchi was born in Queens, raised on Long Island, and received a degree in film and theatre from Hunter College in Manhattan. He has written numerous short plays and four full-length plays (Mercy Killing Kids, It’s Our Kitchen, Tha Chink-Mart, and Impact) which have been workshopped all around NYC. Tha Chink-Mart was a semi-finalist for the 2016/2017 New Dramatists Princess Grace Award. He is a member of Mission to (dit)Mars’ Propulsion Lab, WT Theatre Playwrights Collective, and Ars Nova Play Group. His newest play, The American Tradition, is being developed by Rising Circle Theatre Collective’s INKtank program. You can find him at the local bar on Monday nights or on Twitter @NotoriousYAMs.