Arts & Culture Incubator

Queen City Flash is Director Bridget Leak and Playwright/Composer Trey Tatum. They are committed to:

• Creating new plays — critically acclaimed original works, emboldened by experiments with form, augmented with original music and deepened by collaborations with neighbors and partners.

• Money in people’s pockets, not on the walls — where a minimum of 51 percent of the budget goes to paying local artists, not sustaining venues or overhead.

• Open access — creating experiences that an entire family can afford, enjoyed in transformed and relaxed environments.

Queen City Flash: Bold Stories, Irreverently Told.

An award-winning playwright and AEA actor, Maggie Lou tells epic stories about epic women. After growing up in rural southwest Oklahoma, she attended William Jewell College, Oxford University, and the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. Her work has been seen off-Broadway in New York, as well as Chicago and Los Angeles, and on Tony Award-winning stages. She’s won the Theater J Patty Abramson Jewish Play Prize with Theatre J in DC and the Notre Dame College New Play Festival and was selected for Utah Shakespeare Festival’s Words Cubed Program and Red Bull Theater’s New Short Play Festival. She’s been a finalist for the Henley Rose Playwrighting Award for Women, Central Florida Community Arts New Play Festival, twice for the Lanford Wilson Festival, a semi-finalist for the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, The Road Theater Summer Playwrights Festival, the Garry Marshall Theatre New Works Festival, Dayton Playhouse’s Future Fest, and UP Theater's Renewal Reading Series. Her work has been developed at DePaul University, Human Race Theatre, Inkwell Theatre, Skeleton Rep, and Occasional Drawl Productions and seen at Know Theatre, InBocca Performance, Commonwealth Theatre Center, The Marsh, Eclectic Full Contact Theatre, Idaho Shakespeare, Urban Stages, Theatre Pro Rata, and colleges from coast to coast.

Isaiah Reaves is an emerging young playwright whose work explores a spectrum of Black and Queer experiences. A native of Cincinnati, he graduated cum laude from Northern Kentucky University in 2020. His plays have been commissioned and staged by Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati, Cincinnati Shakespeare Company and many others. Isaiah has received five Michael Kanin Playwriting Awards at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. He is also a semi-finalist for the Ucross and The Blank Theatre Future of Playwriting Prize, a 2020 finalist of the Jackie Demaline Regional Collegiate Playwriting Competition, an Iowa Arts Fellow, and a recipient of a Cincinnati CityBeat Critic’s Pick.

Curtis D. Shepard is an actor, writer and spoken-word artist, as well as the founder of the grassroots support group for dads, D.A.A.M. (Dads Against Angry Moms), which supports moms with more than money and encourages absent dads to be present dads, present dads to be good dads, good dads to be great dads and great dads to reach out and share their experiences and strengths. In August 2022, D.A.A.M.’s first annual Legacy Letters event showcased daughters, mothers and wives sharing through song, poetry and short stories how the legacy of father figures in their lives (and lack thereof) has shaped and influenced them. Curtis has kept busy touring and perfecting his two, one-man shows, UnMasked and Sidewaze Rain, while also co-starring in Greg Stallworth’s stage play Trapped, which premiered at the Indianapolis Fringe Festival in August 2022. His latest collaboration with Greg Stallworth, A Black Father’s Plea, will make its debut at The Indianapolis Onyx Festival in spring 2023. In 2021, his staged reading of Get Off Of Me was performed at the Pacific Northwest Multi Cultural Readers Series & Film Festival. Curtis was a finalist in the 2021 Breath Project with his production, Ronnie and Vince.