MEET THe Queer Cats

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Nicole Jost (she/her) is a playwright and educator, a white queer woman, and an East Coast transplant from Washington, DC. Her first play, The Terror Fantastic, was produced in 2017 by 20% Theatre Company Twin Cities. With Queer Cat Productions, Nicole is the co-writer of four interactive plays (The Gay Divorce Play, Curious at the End: Apocalyptic Cabaret, Felix B. Love is NOT alone, and CAMP!). As a solo playwright, Nicole’s play Sucia was produced by San Francisco State University, University of Central Missouri, and read at South Dakota State University and the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. Other full length plays have been read at San Francisco Playhouse, Z Space, and The Custom Made Theatre Company.

Nicole’s short plays have been presented by Best of PlayGround, B8 Theatre Company, Gadfly Theatre Productions, Rorschach Theatre, and the San Francisco Olympians Festival. Nicole is also a two-time winner of the James Milton Highsmith Playwriting Award for queer theater. She is currently working on her first musical. As an educator, Nicole has spent more than fourteen years teaching young people to write plays of their own. She is the founder of Write for the Stage, a digital platform bringing creative writing to kids wherever they are. Nicole holds an M.F.A. in Playwriting and an M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She lives in San Francisco with her wife and their pets: a nineteen-year-old cat named Molly and a crested gecko named Breadstick.

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Syr Hayati Beker (they/them) is a white, half-Turkish, queer/nonbinary writer and experience creator. They are the co-founder of Queer Cat Productions. They also co-founded the Pirate Art School The Escapery, where they helped hundreds of writers reconnect to their art. Their own words have appeared in Foglifter's Home is Where You Queer Your Heart anthology, The Fairy Tale Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Spunk, Foglifter, Cutthroat, Gigantic Sequins, and on stages and on ships and in cemeteries, and somtimes right behind you. They are a Lambda Fellow in Fiction, a Tin House Scholar, a graduate of Clarion West 2018, and an associate editor of Pseudopod. They can be found at SyrBeker.com, which is most definitely not haunted.

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Genevieve Jessee (she/her) is a playwright based in Puerto Rico. She received her MFA in Playwriting from Boston University. Her work has been staged at PlayGround, The Source Festival, Atlanta Black Theatre Festival, San Francisco Fringe Festival, EXIT theatre, Those Women Productions and the Festival de Marseille. She is the recipient of commissions from PlayGround and Planet Earth Arts. Her awards include the June Anne Baker Prize, Best of the San Francisco Fringe (2012), Emerging Playwright Award (PlayGround), Congo Square Theater's 2021 Emerging + Professional 10 minute play competition winner, and the recipient of a California Arts Council Artists-in-Communities grant. She was a fellow at the 2018 Cultural Diaspora Playwriting Residency at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France where she further developed her play The Diaspora Cycle, which was a finalist for the 2019 Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Semi-finalist for the 2019 O'neill National Playwright's Conference and appeared in the 2020 Kilroys list.

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Nikki Meñez is a director, choreographer, and performer as well as a Bay Area native. She is a graduate of the University of California in Santa Cruz where she received degrees in Environmental Studies and Theater Arts. Nicole works at New Conservatory Theatre Center as the Program Manager for YouthAware Educational Theatre and as Casting Associate. She also wears various creative hats at Custom Made Theater Company, Faultline Theatre, and PianoFight. Directing credits include "In the Heights" by Quiara Alegría Hudes and Lin-Manuel Miranda (Custom made Theatre Company), "How To Be a White Man" by Luna Malbroux & Jennifer Lewis (FaultLine Theater) and "The Importance of Being Earnest" by Oscar Wilde (Actors Ensemble of Berkeley).

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Nara Dahlbacka is a local playwright and director, born and raised in Oakland. She discovered her love for playwriting as an undergrad at UCSB, where she won the first ever Dilling Yang Playwriting Fellowship; and her first two plays (Dayenu and Becky & Dog) were produced –both earning Corwin Metropolitan Theatre Awards. She received an MFA in Playwriting from SFSU, where she was one of the first recipients of the Yeah, I Said Feminist Theatre Fellowships and her play Blood under the Bridge was chosen for the Greenhouse Festival and was a runner up for the Jim Highsmith Award. She directed new works her entire time at SFSU on the mainstage and as part of the Fringe and Greenhouse Festivals. She has also directed for the last four years at the KCACTF Region 7 Festival, and last year her play Twinkle Twinkle Little Lamb was a semi-finalist for the John Cauble one-act award. She has been produced at The Exit Theatre, the Olympians Festival, is part of the SF Playground writer’s pool and is a directing apprentice with Playground. By day, Nara works in local and state politics as well as serving as president of the board of Cat Town Oakland.

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Pam Drummer-Williams’ first role in a production was in “The Wizard of Oz” as a Winged Monkey in the 6th grade and made the theater home from then. She took a 22 year hiatus for the role of mommy and returned in 2009 as ensemble in ACLO’s “Ragtime” and hasn’t slowed one bit.

She was last seen as a part of Same Boat Theater Collective’s 2020 EarthQuake Global Theatre Festival in “The Ballad of the Dying Body” as Naima, “Geointerfering” as CEO, “Sisters Three and a Tree” as Sister A and Narrator in “Post-Apocalyptic Beer Fest” and “Untouchable”. She made her debut as Lady Ptomaine “Bibbidi Bobbidi Boos” with Dragon and Fuse Theatres, with Playland Production in “Bitsy Bites Back” as Pepper, A full Zoom play with Same Boat Theater Collective in “The Emeryville Horror” as The Mayor. Also, on Zoom Pam has been seen in living rooms via Zoom with Queer Cat Productions in “Felix B. Love Is Not Alone” as Dr. Ray Daly.

Some of her favorite roles have been with B8 Theatre Co. in “Strange Ladies” as “Suffragist Mary based on Mary Church Terrell”, with Queer Cat Productions in “The Gay Divorce Play” as The Officiant, with Contra Costa Civic Theatre in “Ragtime” as Sarah’s Friend, with Contra Costa Civic Theatre, in “You Can’t Take it With You” as Penelope Sycamore, and with Pinole Community Playhouse in “Godspell” as Pam.

When not working or performing, Pam is living vicariously through her daughter, a commercial pilot who is living her dreams as we all should!!

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Rawiyah Tariq is a gender non-binary artist and kink aware professional with roots in queer, poly-amorous, fat community. Their tone is reflective of these roots and their work is informed by how these intersect with their Blackness. Magic, massage, storytelling and performance art are tools they use to liberate, heal and reclaim space for marginalized communities. They believe in cohesive and somatic practices that align body, mind and spirit.

Rawiyah Tariq has danced on stages throughout the country with the award winning and internationally traveled troupe Rubenesque Burlesque as Magnoliah Black from 2009 to 2015. As a solo performer their work (often preformed on mainstream stages) continues to reflect body liberation, visibility and self possession beyond the static sizest and often racist Eurocentric beauty myth. Rawiyah was celebrity model for the first annual Queer Fashion Week in 2015 & 2016, Curvy Girl Lingerie and has been photo’d for Curve magazine in Bertha Pearl’s Size Queen Fashions.

A former member of Santa Clara County Leather Association since and former Associate Producer of Red Hots Burlesque the country’s longest running queer burlesque & cabaret show Rawiyah has worked to create and maintain space for artists and players of diverse backgrounds and talents.

Rawiyah is a past Board Member of good standing and FeMCee of The Body Political and has continued with the organization in creating programming for queer youth.

Rawiyah is the co-founder of A Sovereign Embodiment Healing Collective. As ASE Collective’s Certified Massage Therapist and spirit worker they focus on QTPOC, Disabled, Elderly, Fat and Other’ed bodied folk. Their prices are set to support low income communities. They offer barter and trade options as well as free monthly massages to community members in need. For more see A Sovereign Embodiment

They have facilitated and spoken at events such as Baycon, NOLOSE, Fat Activist Conference: Tools for the Revolution , Fatty Affair, Pantheacon, Mystic South, The Northwest Pagan Conference and the Modern Witches Confluence. They have spoken at several universities including UC Berkeley, Stanford, Stanulious and San Jose State regarding intersectionality, sex, fat, feminism and health.

As a producer and presenter they consciously centers marginalized groups for spotlight appearances at events such as BayCon, Folsom Fringe and the Hubba Hubba Review.

Rawiyah’s most recent published work can be found in “The Politics of Size” co-authored with Juana Tango and edited by Ragen Chastian and their journey documented in interviews in Nia King’s “Queer and Trans Artist of Color”. Connect to them on social media via facebook, twitter and instagram or follow them at their blog mammyisdead.com. You can also catch them as a feature in the film Fattitude and Heavenly Brown Body

Currently, Rawiyah is living in the Bay Area while continuing work on their book and A Sovereign Embodiment as well as providing care to Black Queer & Trans therapists via Project Ete Sen with Ella Ofori LMFT.

You can find out more and support their work at mammyisdead.com.

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Simone Person is a Black queer femme, two-time Pink Door Writing Retreat fellow, and the managing editor for just femme & dandy. They are the author of two award-winning chapbooks, Dislocate (Honeysuckle Press, 2018) and Smoke Girl (Diode Editions, 2019), and they were selected as a first-place winner of Boston Review’s 2021 Annual Poetry Contest by Sonia Sanchez. Simone grew up in small Michigan towns and Toledo, Ohio. They can be found at simoneperson.com and on Instagram and Twitter at @princxporkchop.