Noa Gardner is a Native Hawaiian playwright born and raised in Kaimuki on the island of O’ahu. He started writing plays at Loyola Marymount University (2016) in a playwriting course taught by a professor named Kelly Younger. With his professor’s encouragement, Noa continued his studies at the University of Southern California MFA Dramatic Writing program (2020),where he studied under distinguished playwrights such as Velina Hasu Houston, Oliver J. Mayer,Paula Cizmar, Luis Alf

Born along the famed shores of Makaha, raised in the malu of Mauna Kaʻala, nurtured atop the hill of Kapālama, and swaddled by the Kaiāulu of the unrivaled Waiʻanae Coast, J.J. Kaʻōpua found her place as a peppy ʻōpio during the post-Hawaiian-Renaissance nineties Oʻahu. Back then, Hawaiians were a lot of things: passionate, proud, and maybe even  a little pissed off at the unearthed miseducations of culture and history at the hands of American assimilation a century sooner. M

Hannah ʻĪʻī-Epstein Hannah Ii-Epstein (she/her) is a Native Hawaiian creative writer and award-winning dramatist from the North Shore of Oʻahu. Her work centers Native Hawaiian identity and LGBTQIA+ experiences, blending cultural tradition with contemporary storytelling across theatre and film. She earned her MFA in Writing for the Screen and Stage from Northwestern University and is the Artistic Director of Nothing Without a Company, a Chicago-based theatre company dedicated