Rhiana Yazzie is an award-winning playwright, a director, and filmmaker. A Navajo Nation citizen (Ta’neeszahnii dóó Táchii’nii), Yazzie is the Artistic Director of New Native Theatre, which she founded in 2009 in response to the lack of connection and professional opportunities between Twin Cities theaters and the Native community. New Native Theatre is the recipient of the 2023 Headwaters Bush Prize. Yazzie received the 2021 Lanford Wilson Award, 2020 Steinberg Award, and 2017 Sally Ordway Award for Vision. In 2018, she was named a Bush Foundation Leadership Fellow. Her new play, The Other Children of the Sun, will premiere at The Kennedy Center in 2025. She is also writing plays for Solas Nua (Washington, DC), Fishamble (Ireland), Long Wharf Theatre (New Haven, CT), Rattlestick Theater (New York), and the University of New Mexico. In 2023, she directed the US premiere of Missing at the Anchorage Opera and is now working on her first libretto, Little Ones, with Anishinaabe composer Danielle Jagelski.
Yazzie wrote, produced, and directed her debut feature film, A Winter Love, which has been in mainstream and Indigenous film festivals around the globe. She is a graduate of the University of Southern California’s Master of Professional Writing program where she produced events featuring Stephen Hawking, Herbie Hancock, and Spalding Gray. Yazzie is a writer on AMC’s Dark Winds (Seasons 2 and 3), and is working on her second feature film.
A performer and composer, Gary Rue has been playing music for audiences throughout the western hemisphere since the mid-’60s, beginning with various town halls in the upper Midwest and graduating to East Coast “tent” tours that included the Big Apple (Carnegie Hall as music director and duet partner for Gene Pitney) and on to far-flung points in Canada and the Caribbean. Early along the way, Rue began writing music of his own and was rewarded with some of his songs being recorded by (among others) Nick Lowe and Helen Reddy, as well as many prominent regional artists. He is the author of nearly 80 scores for music theatre, including The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fair(l)y (Stoopid) Tales, which toured the U.S. and China with Dallas Children’s Theater. Rue is also a 2010 Minnesota Music Hall of Fame inductee and an active touring musician and educator.
