Phillis In Boston

Adeola Solanke is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter and founder of Spora Stories. Her plays include her acclaimed debut Pandora's Box, which won a Best New Play nomination in London's Off-West End Theatre Awards and was shortlisted for the $100,000 Nigeria Prize for Literature, Africa's biggest literary award. It toured to 17 UK venues with support from Arts Council England. Her play The Court Must Have a Queen, commissioned by Historic Royal Palaces, was staged in the Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace. Her work has also been performed at the Arcola, Almeida, Young Vic, and Sheffield Crucible theaters. 

A double Fulbrighter, she is a 22/23 Fulbright Distinguished International Scholar at Emerson College and was formerly a Fulbright Fellow, Phi Beta Kappa International Scholar, and Association of American University Scholar at USC, where she earned an MFA from the School of Cinematic Arts. In Los Angeles, she was twice an Academy Nicholls Screenwriting Fellowship semi-finalist and a story analyst for New Line and Sundance. She also worked in the story department at Disney. Solanke has a BA Hons in English Literature from the University of Sheffield, winning its Distinguished Alumni Award in 2016. She has written for the BBC, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Art Monthly, The Voice, West Africa Magazine, and others. A Hawthornden Fellow, she was also a founding Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund and its first British Film Institute Writer in Residence. Solanke has run playwriting programs at the Royal Court and Soho and Arcola theaters in London. She has also taught screenwriting at the University of London and in Nigeria, Ghana, and Zimbabwe. She was a judge for the South African Writers Guild Awards and the UK's Royal African Society Baobab Film Award. Solanke also lectures in dramatic writing internationally.

Regge Life is a producer, director, and writer. His latest show is Cross That River at 59E59 Theaters in New York. For Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, MA, he directed the 2022 production of Hymn, the 2019 multiple Berkie Award-winning production of Topdog/Underdog, the widely acclaimed Morning After Grace in 2018, God of Carnage in 2017, and Kaufman’s Barbershop in 2013. He has directed across the country with credits I Just Stopped by to See the Man for Milwaukee Rep, Yellowman and Gem of the Ocean for Pittsburgh Public Theater, Ghosts for the Pearl Theater, The Piano Lesson for Virginia Stage Company, A Walk in the Woods at Capital Rep, Rebel Armies Deep Into Chad, and Laurence Fishburne’s Riff Raff and Arthur Miller’s The American Clock for the Juilliard School. He is currently the Senior Distinguished Director in Residence at Emerson College in Boston.