Congratulations to Femmaeve MacQueen, Maya Lavender, Tomi Fawehinmi, Brazil Remani, Melissa Simmons, Nathan Jerpe, and Victoria Nation, the 2026 Southern Fried Bake-Off Playwrights!
Don’t miss out on this fun and creative way to jumpstart your new year. Watch creativity unfold! Witness the magic firsthand as playwrights, actors, and crew collaborate for an exhilarating 24 hours to create brand-new plays inspired by a Bake-Off theme and a list of “ingredients.”
Tickets to the 7pm public performance on January 3 are NOW available at EssentialTheatre.Tix.com.
*proudly brought to you by Essential Theatre and 7Stages
About the Playwrights:
Femmaeve MacQueen is an Atlanta-based actress and writer dedicated to audacious transgender visibility on stage and screen. Her playwriting credits include a series of one-act farces at Cornelia Street Cafe (NYC) and the full-length verse drama The Resurrection of Clay (2012 O’Neill Semi-finalist) at Under St. Marks (NYC). She holds advanced degrees in queer performance studies and American studies, focusing on interruptive theater, structural oppression, and collective emancipation. Her short plays, Like Vines and A Man of Her Times received staged readings at Working Title Playwrights’ 2025 Fornés Conference and Ghostlight Lab, respectively. Femm is a 2025 writing fellow at FADlab, Atlanta, and will be performing a workshop of her new solo show, Still Life With Roses, in December 2025.
Maya Lavender is a theatermaker and Atlanta native. She received a B.A. in Theater and Performance and Anthropology from Bard College. Much of her work is focused on metatheatre, coming of age, and finding humor in the mundane.
Tomi Fawehinmi is a Nigerian-American actress and playwright originally from the Metro Atlanta area. She graduated from School of the Arts @ Central Gwinnett High School in 2024, and is currently a second year student at Northwestern University, where she studies Theatre and Cognitive Science. Two of her short plays have been produced in play festivals at the School of the Arts. She was chosen to attend the New South Young Playwrights Festival (2024) at Horizon Theatre for her short play One Line, Two Lines.
Brazil Remani (she/her) is a proud Southern playwright and financial professional whose work centers the richness, resilience, and complexity of modern life in the Deep South. Her plays explore the intersection of individuals, families, and larger systems—whether community, government, or workplace—often set in the post-Obama era to examine promises of inclusivity against enduring inequities.
Melissa Simmons is a playwright, director, and producer based in Atlanta. She is the founder of MerryCat Productions, an experimental theater company that explores history’s haunting moments through immersive, movement-driven storytelling on stage. By day, she works as a Production Manager for Out of Hand Theater, an Atlanta non-profit working at the intersection of art, social justice, and civic engagement.
Nathan Jerpe is a pataphysician and verse practitioner making theater in Atlanta. “My most recent play, a one-act stomach romp called Digestive Reasoning, was produced for the Theatre About Science conference in Coimbra, Portugal, in October 2025. I am the acting treasurer of Working Title Playwrights, the largest new-play incubator in the Southeast, and in 2023 I was a finalist in Essential Theatre’s First Ever Southern Fried Bake-off! in which I baked my way to a cool seventh place.”
Victoria Nation is a writer, director, prop designer and multimedia theatre maker. She has been working in Atlanta theatre since 2019.
