CRYSTAL SKILLMAN is an award winning Brooklyn based playwright. Her play Another Kind of Love, about a family of punk rock singers, featuring original music by Heidi Rodewald (Passing Strange), played at the Chopin Theater in Chicago in a Spring 2015 production with Infusion Theater Company which earned rave reviews, including the Chicago Reader which called the play a “Masterpiece” and the Chicago Tribune which noted “Skillman has crafted a poignant portrait of a family that can’t run away from its own desires or demons — they simply have to learn how to find new songs for old pain.” Her three recent plays, King Kirby, co-written with Fred Van Lente, Geek! and Cut, have all earned Critics Picks from The New York Times. Wild earned three 2014 New York Innovation Theater Award nominations for its sold out production at IRT Theater (following a critically successful run in Chicago with Kid Brooklyn Productions and Off Broadway in MCC Theater’s Playlabs at the Lucille Lortel.) Skillman’s other plays include: The Vigil or The Guided Cradle, winner of the 2010 New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Full-Length Script, and her new play, Rain and Zoe Save the World, about two teenage activists on a cross-country mission. Musicals with award-winning composer Bobby Cronin include: (Un)Lucky in Love and the musical theater adaption of the film Mary and Max, to be directed by Outer Critics Circle Award-winning Stafford Arima with mask design by Joseph Osheroff and puppetry design by Acheson Walsh Studios. Mary and Max will be workshopped with Broadway Dreams at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia this August. Crystal is represented by Amy Wagner and Ron Gwiazda at Abrams Artists Agency in NY, and James Beresford with Shepard Management in the UK. Her work can be read/purchased at her publisher Samuel French, as well as indietheaternow.com.