Rhiana Yazzie is a 2021 Lanford Wilson and 2020 Steinberg Award winning playwright, a director, a filmmaker, and the Artistic Director of New Native Theatre (2023 Bush Prize Award for social justice impact), which she started in 2009 as a response to the lack of connection and professional opportunities between Twin Cities theaters and the Native community. She's a Navajo Nation citizen who's clans are Ta’neeszahnii bashishchiin dóó Táchii’nii dashinalí. She has a co-commissioned play, Like the Polar Bear Mom, in the works with Long Wharf Theatre and Rattlestick Theater. Her play, The Other Children of the Sun will premiere at the Kennedy Center next January and she is currently writing plays for Solas Nua & Ireland’s Fishamble theaters, and the University of New Mexico. Nancy, is a sequel to Queen Cleopatre and Princess Pocahontas (commissioned by Oregon Shakespeare Festival and The Public Theater). It is on this year's Kilroy's List and is also a recipient of a Venturous Theater Award. Rhiana directed the US Premiere of the opera, Missing, a story about a missing and murdered Indigenous woman, at the Anchorage Opera in 2023. Her first feature film, A Winter Love, (writer/director/producer/actor) is currently playing in film festivals globally and she is working on her second feature film, Wounspe Wankatya: A College Education, a project in preproduction that was invited to the 2021 Sundance Producers Summit and won a Jerome Foundation Production grant. In her spare time, Rhiana writes for AMC’s Dark Winds.