2024 New York Next Generation Event

Nazi Germany invaded Hungary, and within a month, authorities forced Ruth and her family to move into a crowded ghetto. By mid-May, the Nazis and their Hungarian collaborators began sending Jews from Hungary by train to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Soon after arriving at the killing center, Ruth learned the SS had already murdered her mother, brother, and little cousins. Ruth and her sister, Teresa, managed to survive, and reunited with their father after the war. Ruth’s time imprisoned at Auschwitz coincides with the period in which the photographs that inspired the play Here There Are Blueberries were taken. Ruth has been a volunteer at the Museum since 2003. Photo: Ruth Cohen. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

There, she created top-rated programming for diverse broadcast networks, including NatGeo, Discovery Channel, TLC, WeTV, Animal Planet, and Science Channel. A charter member of Tectonic Theater Project, Amanda directed the company’s Toronto production of Gross Indecency and was one of the group of artists who co-created The Laramie Project, later made into an HBO film. Amanda works as a script development consultant and teaches interview-based storytelling, using techniques she developed as an adjunct lecturer in the graduate program of educational theatre at the City College of New York. She is at work founding a non-fiction play development institute. A book about her original play-devising methods will be released by SIU Press. Photo: Amanda Gronich. Jenny Anderson

His West End productions include Gross Indecency and This Is How It Goes. His off-Broadway/regional work includes Here There Are Blueberries (writer/director); Las Aventuras de Juan Planchard (writer/director); Seven Deadly Sins (Drama Desk Award); One Arm by Tennessee Williams; The Laramie Project; The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later; Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (Lucille Lortel Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, Callaway Award); Macbeth with Liev Schreiber; and Master Class with Rita Moreno. His opera credits include El Gato Con Botas. His film and TV credits include HBO’s The Laramie Project (two Emmy nominations, Sundance Film Festival, National Board of Review Award, Humanitas Prize) and The L Word. Photo: Moisés Kaufman. Jenny Anderson

He was nominated for an LA Drama Critics Circle Award for The Inheritance at the Geffen Playhouse. Previously on Broadway, Adam starred in Fiddler on the Roof, Next to Normal, and Rent (final cast, filmed live for Sony Pictures). Off-Broadway, he starred in The Last Five Years at Second Stage and Avenue Q at New World Stages. Regional highlights include Noir at the Alley as well as Diner at the Signature. On TV, he was in Billions on Showtime as “Pununzio” and The Good Wife on CBS as “Ezra.” He recently starred in the feature film Either Side of Midnight. Adam is a graduate of Northwestern University and the British American Dramatic Academy. He has been a coach for the National High School Music Theatre Awards (“The Jimmy Awards”) since 2014. He was a co-creator of the digital special “Saturday Night Seder,” which supported the CDC Foundation and was produced by his interactive experiential food and theatre company StoryCourse. Adam has headlined concerts at Carnegie Hall as well as Princeton Symphony Orchestra, among others.  

Photo: Adam Kantor. Emil Cohen

He was previously nominated for Tony and Drama Desk awards for the Broadway revivals of Lanford Wilson’s Burn This (2019) and Falsettos (2017). He received a 2015 Tony nomination for his performance as Adam Hochberg in An American in Paris. Other Broadway credits include The Band’s Visit, Prince of Broadway and Baby, It’s You! Brandon recently starred in Tick, Tick … BOOM! at the Kennedy Center, directed by Neil Patrick Harris, and in the acclaimed 2021 off-Broadway revival of Assassins at CSC, directed by John Doyle. Film credits include Here Today, The Kitchen, and Stage Fright. Series credits include The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Fosse/Verdon, Dietland, Blue Bloods, Inside Amy Schumer, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

Photo: Brandon Uranowitz. Josh Wool