Faculty

 
Ms. Hammond wrote the screenplay for Julie Johnson, produced by Shooting Gallery Films, co-written by director Bob Gosse, starring Lili Taylor, Courtney Love and Spalding Gray.  The film premiered in the Sundance Film Festival and  played in film festivals all over the world winning many awards including Best Feature in the Barcelona Film Festival and an Audience Award in Berlin. She wrote the screenplay for A Beautiful Life produced by Calla productions, starring Jesse Garcia, Angela Sarafyan, Bai Ling, and Dana Delany.  Ms. Hammond wrote and directed the short film, Lehi’s Wife, through AFI’s Directors Workshop for Women, now in post-production. James Greene and Kathryn Joosten star in the film.
 
Ms. Hammond is a recipient of an NEA grant, an NYFA grant, a McNight Fellowship and a Drama League Award.  She has been invited twice to the Sundance Play Unit, twice to the O’Neill Center, five times to New River Dramatists and is New Dramatists alumnus.  She holds an MFA from New York University’s Dramatic Writing Program, an M.Div. from Yale Divinity School, and worked in the Chesterfield Writers Project. She has taught playwriting and screenwriting courses in several universities including Brown University, Connecticut College.  She has also taught in the Sewannee Writers Conference, the Writers at Work Conference, and in the prison ward of Bellevue Hospital.  For five years she served on the faculty of the University of Michigan.  
 
Currently she is working on a play, Ecstacy: The Enigma of Joseph Smith, an historical fantasy of the wild life of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church.
She lives with her beloved husband and amazing son.

William C. Kovacsik

William C. Kovacsik received his B.A. in English Literature from Drew University, and earned a J.D. from the Fordham University School of Law.  In 1994, he received an M.F.A. in Playwriting from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was on the faculty from 1994-2001, teaching all undergraduate courses in playwriting, as well as dramatic literature, theatre history, theatre lab, directing and acting.

Mr. Kovacsik’s plays have been performed all across America. In 2005, The Masrayana was co-produced by the Prop Theatre and the Rasaka Theatre Company in Chicago. The Masrayana went on to win the Joseph Jefferson Citation Award as Best New Play in Chicago for 2005-2006. From February – March 2004, his play The Barksdale Confession was presented by the WorkShop Theater Company in New York.   

Music of the Spheres, an historical piece dealing with the life of 12th-century mystic and composer Hildegard von Bingen, was staged by the Hartt School at the University of Hartford in May 2003. Pillar of Salt won the 2003 International Playwriting Contest dealing with religious and spiritual themes sponsored by Hanover College, and received a full production on the Hanover campus in February 2004. Pillar of Salt received a staged reading at New York’s WorkShop Theater in December 2006.  Scales of Justice had its professional premiere at the Long Beach Playhouse in the fall of 2002, where it received favorable notices from a variety of area newspapers. Previously, Scales of Justice was named Best Play in the 1999 Dayton Playhouse FutureFest, where it was praised by critics from the Newark Star-Ledger and the Village Voice. Scales of Justice was published by Playscripts, Inc. in 2006.   

In 1999, Lewis J. Stadlen (two-time Tony Award nominee, also known as Tony Soprano’s poker-playing dentist Ira Fried on HBO’s The Sopranos) starred in Mr. Kovacsik’s play Slice of Immortality in the Carnegie Mellon Summer New Plays Project, staged by noted Broadway and regional director Michael Montel. Slice of Immortality, a comedy dealing with the last days in the life of the ancient Greek playwright Euripides, was also performed as a staged reading by New York’s Lark Theatre Company in 1999, and was presented as part of the 2007 Western Region Playwrights Showcase sponsored by the Arvada Center in Denver. 

Epistles won the 1997 Coe College Playwriting Prize. The Run of the River was named Best Play of the 1995 Pittsburgh New Works Festival by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Mr. Kovacsik has had several other plays appear in the Pittsburgh New Works Festival, including Move to First, The Alpha State and Bomber Wing. Priscilla’s Neurosis was a Critic’s Choice in the 2001 Samuel French Short Play Festival. Also in 2001, Kovacsik’s adaptation of The Chitrangada, a dramatic poem by Rabindranath Tagore, was performed at the Kelly-Strayhorn Theatre in Pittsburgh by Srishti Dances of India. 

In addition to his work at Carnegie Mellon, Mr. Kovacsik has taught playwriting at the Pittsburgh Public Theater, where he founded the Advanced Playwrights Lab, and at the University of Colorado. He has directed in both academic and professional venues. Mr. Kovacsik practiced law on Wall Street, specializing in litigation involving municipal finance, securities law, domestic antitrust, international trade regulation and real estate brokerage. He has also consulted for several high-end firms in the wine industry.