Caryl Churchill was born on September 3, 1938, in London and grew up in the Lake District and in Montreal. She was educated at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Downstairs, her first play written while she was still at university, was first staged in 1958 and won an award at the Sunday Times National Union of Students Drama Festival. Caryl Churchill’s plays include Owners, Traps, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Cloud 9, Top Girls, Fen, Serious Money, Ice Cream, Mad Forest, The Skriker, Blue Heart, This is a Chair, Far Away, A Number, Drunk Enough To Say I Love You?, Seven Jewish Children, Love & Information, Here We Go and Escaped Alone. Music theatre includes Lives of the Great Poisoners and Hotel, both with Orlando Gough. Caryl has also written for radio and television.

Liz Diamond is a Resident Director at Yale Repertory Theatre and serves as Chair of the Directing program at David Geffen School of Drama. Productions at Yale Rep include The Winter’s Tale; Lucinda Coxon’s Happy Now? (also at Primary Stages in New York); Marcus Gardley’s dance of the holy ghosts (world premiere); Strindberg’s Miss Julie; Sunil Kuruvilla’s Fighting Words and Rice Boy (world premiere); Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy; Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle and St. Joan of the Stockyards; and Suzan-Lori Parks’ The America Play (world premiere), The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (world premiere), and Father Comes Homes From the Wars, Parts 1, 2 & 3. She has directed new plays, adaptations, and classical works at theatres including the Alliance, American Repertory Theater, The Public Theater, Vineyard Theatre, Theatre for a New Audience, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Westport Country Playhouse, and has won the OBIE and the Connecticut Critics Circle Awards for Outstanding Direction. Additional projects at Yale include Diamond’s staging of her translation of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat, in a joint Yale School of Drama/Yale School of Music production at Carnegie Hall, as well as Matthew Suttor’s and Timothy Young’s musical adaptation of Blaise Cendrar’s epic poem, La Prose du Transibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France for the Beinecke Library’s 50th-anniversary celebration.