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Bill Ballantyne (Playwriting Course, Playwriting Workshop & Script Consulting Service)

Bill graduated from the Yale School Of Drama, where he studied with such giants as Stella Adler, Bobby Lewis, and Robert Brustein. He moved back to his native Toronto and worked as an actor for several years. He was eventually invited by Robin Phillips to be his assistant director at the Stratford Festival.

He wrote his first play, The Al Cornell Story, in 1982. It was an immediate hit, winning a Dora Mavor Moore Award. He was hooked. His second play, Bat Masterson’s Last Regular Job, was performed in Toronto and in New York simultaneously. He has written 16 plays to date, receiving international praise.

Bill has taught playwriting at Toronto's Ryerson University since 2000. He also presents seminars with Victoria College, Theatre Passe Muraille, The Tarragon Theatre, and The Yale Dramatists League. Bill is also the chief script consultant at Warrington International, where he writes and edits documentaries, features, and shorts.

To enter Bill’s mind, please read Writing A Play, published in Scene 4 Magazine and CanPlay.
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Nina DeCastro (Sit-com writing workshop and Script Consulting Service)

Nina DeCastro's credits include Fox Television's "The Tick" (staff writer), NBC's "It's Not About Me" (staff writer), ABC's "Odd Man Out" and Nickolodeon's "All That." She has worked as a story analyst for Miramax and CBS, and is currently Director of Development for Overland Literary Management in Los Angeles. Nina is also a regular guest speaker in story analysis classes at the American Film Institute.
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Olga Humphrey (Screenwriting Workshop and Script Consulting Service)

Olga Humphrey has worked as a programming executive for HBO's new business development group. In that capacity, she screened and selected numerous films for the service, from classic fare to new films seeking their first home on cable TV. Since then, she has been a story analyst and consultant (analyzing both scripts and novels) for many of the top independent film companies and studios located in New York, including Miramax, Focus Features, USA Films, October Films, MGM-UA, Hallmark Entertainment, Spring Creek, Walden Media and others. Olga did private script consulting for Sandra Bullock, working on two projects that the actress was attached to at the time. She was the favored story consultant for top producers Robert Halmi, Sr. ("Dinotopia," "Merlin") and Donna Gigliotti ("Shakespeare in Love"). Olga recommended that Walden Media adapt the popular children's book "Holes" into a film, and, two years later, it made it to the big screen as a box-office winner and critical success. Other screenplays that Olga did consulting work on and recommended include: several drafts of "Gosford Park" (Academy Award winner, Best Screenplay), "About Schmidt" (Writers Guild Award nominee), "Possession" (directed by Neil LaBute), the international hit "Bend It Like Beckham," "Around the World in Eighty Days" starring Jackie Chan, "The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby" "50 First Kisses" (starring Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore), and many, many others.

As a writer, Olga's plays have been published and produced around the U.S. and internationally. She has written for television, including the current kids hit "Oobi" seen on Noggin and Nick Jr. Her screenplays have attracted star talent and two projects, "Spark" and "Tea With Pippa," are currently being financed. She was recently awarded a Fellowship by the IFP/New York. Her first short film recently received its world premiere at the legendary Anthology Film Archives in New York. Olga respects and admires all writers and finds the greatest satisfaction in helping them fully realize their work
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Fred Mills (Script Consulting Service - TV Hour Episodic and Movies-for-Television)

Fred Mills is one of Los Angeles' busiest TV writers. As a writer/producer, his credits include "The People Next Door" (Steve Tisch Productions), "Prophet of Evil: The Ervil Lebaron Story" (Dream City Films/Hearst), and "Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story" (Republic Pictures/CM Two), all broadcast on CBS. He has also written for NBC, ABC, Fox, and Lifetime Television, and won first prize in the 2000 Cinestory competition for feature films. He has been a guest speaker at the University of California (Irvine), and runs a screenwriting workshop in Los Angeles.
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Laurie Scheer (Screenwriting Course, Screenwriting Workshop and Script Consulting Service)

Laurie Scheer has worked as a script development consultant for numerous production companies including, Showtime, MTV, Nickelodeon, Carolco, HBO, ABC Productions, Hearst Entertainment, Columbia Pictures, and most recently, The Sundance Institute. During the next eight years at Viacom Enterprises International, she was responsible for acquiring, screening, and purchasing programming, while also developing network series such as the "Perry Mason" Specials, "Matlock," "Key West," and numerous TV/Cable movies including "The Operation," "The Anissa Ayala Story," "Paris Trout," and "Desperate Journey."

In addition, Scheer has purchased, developed, and preproduced a number of independent feature film projects. She has participated in creating courses at UCLA, UW-Madison, University, and Loyola University, Chicago, and taught screenwriting, producing, and television and film business courses at Northwestern University, DePaul University, the University of Chicago, and Columbia College. From early 1998 until April 1999 she was the Vice President of Programming for AMC Networks’ Romance Classics where she launched the inventive new cable channel, overseeing the development, production and execution to air of numerous Original Series and Specials. Her first book, "Creative careers in Hollywood," was recently published by Allworth Press.
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Mike Snyder (Screenwriting Workshop)

Mike's many produced screenplays include "Rescue Me" for Cannon Films, directed by Arthur Alan Seidelman, "Savage Land" (with Graham Greene), "The Long Road Home" (co-writer, Republic Pictures), and, again as co-writer, "Paradiso" for Vidmark Films, which he also directed. His television credits include numerous episodes of "Hart to Hart" and "The Dream Team," as well as "Shannon," "Airwolf," and the Movie of the Week "Time Bomb." He has also worked in the story departments at NBC, Hanna-Barbera and Universal Studios.
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Ruth Margraff (Playwriting Workshop & Script Consulting Service)

Ruth Margraff's work has been developed and produced in New York by The Public Theatre, Lincoln Center, Kitchen, New York Theatre Workshop, Guggenheim Museum, Cooper Union, Hourglass/Century Ballroom, CUNY/Martin Segal, BAM Next Wave, the Apollo, CAMI, HERE/Harp, and others; in Louisville, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Seattle, Boston, Tuscaloosa, Providence, Austin, Dallas, Iowa City, Los Angeles; and internationally in Russia, Greece, Japan, India, Croatia, Serbia, The Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Turkey, Great Britain, Canada, and elsewhere. She has taught playwriting at UTexas/Michener Center, Brown, Fordham, Yale School of Drama, Allihies (Ireland), Aristotle University (Thessaloniki), University of Athens, Peaceworks/Swayam/Kalam (Calcutta), etc. She is published in a new textbook from Kendall/Hunt, and by Watson Gutpill/Backstage Books, American Theatre, Theater Forum, Dramatist, Johns Hopkins, Manchester, NuMuse Anthology/Brown, Chain/Temple, Epoch/Cornell, Conjunctions/Bard, and Autonomedia. Ruth is an alumnus of New Dramatists, core member of the Playwrights’ Center and co-leader of a Theatre Without Borders initiative on peacebuilding and coexistence. She has recently been awarded her 4th Rockefeller Foundation commission with Big Red Media/Apollo Theater, a McKnight National Commission/Residency, and a Fulbright lecture/research award to Greece.
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Mark S.P. Turvin (Playwriting Workshop & Script Consulting Service)

Mark Turvin has had over 50 productions of his 20 plays, as well as countless readings and workshops in Phoenix, Boston, and New York. He has had his work produced from Finland to Thailand, and from San Diego to Off Off Broadway in Manhattan. Four of his plays have been published, and one is the second longest running show in Arizona, logging in at seven years of performances. Mark is also an accomplished actor, director, and producer.

Mark was Playwriting Instructor, Workshop Facilitator, and Dramaturg-in-Residence at PlayWright's Theatre in Phoenix for four years, and is currently Dramaturg-in-Residence at Theater Works in Peoria, Arizona. He has been a Theatre Critic since 1995, and is a columnist for Back Stage Newspapers in New York. He studied playwriting at Playwrights Horizons under Albert Innaurato. He received his B.A.s in Dramatic Arts and English with a minor in Creative Writing at S.U.N.Y. at Geneseo, and his M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Publishing with an emphasis in Playwriting at Emerson College. He is a freelance writer, and has been a newspaper columnist, a television and advertising copywriter and writer/producer, and an essayist. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild and the American Theatre Critics Association.
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