WETWorks

A Playwright-in-Residence program

Conceived and Curated by Nelle Tankus and Anamaria Guerzon

WETWorks is our brand new Playwright-in-Residence program, in partnership with Hugo House. Over the next year, WET will collaborate with four playwrights for a three-month paid residency each. They will be provided space to write and a creative team, culminating in a final presentation at Hugo House at the end of their tenure. WETWorks provides the tangible resources, community connections, and creative space needed for Seattle playwrights. With this program we hope to answer a call for Seattle based playwriting opportunity, as well as echo the Pacific Northwest lens and experience back to ourselves.

SUBSCRIBE TO SEASON 22

MEET THE CURATORS

Anamaria Guerzon (She/They) is a mixed race Filipino-American Theatre Artist, specializing in playwriting, acting and dramaturgy. Their work seeks to explore humanness, with an emphasis on marginalization within hierarchy, and the legacy of ongoing colonization. Within this, they center Brown folks, particularly Filipino people, as this reflects their heritage and identity. They believe in the power of specificity. They also believe in the inherent magic of the human experience, and seek to represent this lived reality through the fantastic and strange. They blur the lines between this magic and the mundane, with the understanding that both exist, and life is full of inherent contradictions.

Their plays have been developed in a workshop/readings with programs such as: The Playwright Realm’s Scratchpad Series (dir. May Adrales), and Seattle Public Theater’s New Works Distillery (dir. Zenaida Smith), Village Theater’s Northwest Creator’s Program, and Copious Love’s Plays On Tap series. They have also been honored by the June Bingham Playwright Commission (Finalist), Ashland New Play Festival (Semi-Finalist) and Origins New Play Festival (Semi-Finalist/pending). They have been acting locally for the past few years with theaters such as The 5th Ave Educational Touring Company, Reboot, Book-It Rep, Pork Filled Productions, and more. They received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Theatre, from Pacific Lutheran University (2021).

Nelle Tankus (she/her) is a playwright & performer whose work explores queerness, the absurd, and metamorphosis. Her full-length work has been seen in Seattle at Annex Theatre (Tenderness, dir. Grace Carmack and E. Pike), The Umbrella Project (Slack Water, dir. QuiQui Dominguez), and Parley Productions (Yom Kippur, dir. Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth). Her shorter works have been seen most recently at 12 Minutes Max, Parley, and MirrorStage. She was a semi-finalist for the Jerome Fellowship (2021/2022), Playwrights Realm Scratchpad Series (2019), and the Eugene O’Neil National Playwright’s Conference 2018). Most recently, she was a cohort of the 2021 María Irene Fornés Playwriting Workshop. She holds a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts. She is based on Duwamish Land [aka Seattle], and is a proud member of Parley Playwrights Group.