Free Playwriting Workshop for Adults with Stephanie Kyung Sun Walters

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Free Playwriting Workshop for Adults with Stephanie Kyung Sun Walters

Your Setting as a Main Character: In this free playwriting workshop, participants will enjoy writing prompts and exercises that focus on the play's world' setting as a character. Geographical, liminal, and magical spaces and places that ask audiences to consider the landscape of a play as a place of change that moves the story forward. Examples of plays with impactful settings will be provided and discussed. Come ready to write - you can join with the seed of an idea or nothing at all, all you need is a willingness to explore

About The Instructor

Stephanie Kyung Sun Walters (she/her) was the Philadelphia Theatre Company 2022 Terrence McNally Award Recipient for her play, Acetone Wishes and Plexiglass Dreams. She’s a current American Theatre Group PlayLab artist, an alum of InterAct Theatre Core Playwright, and a 2022 Sesame Workshop Writers' Room Fellow. She created and served as the Lead Artist on the Philly Asian Performing Artists’ Playwrights Project. Her play, Esther Choi and the Fish that Drowned, postponed due to the pandemic) was set to world premiere production with Simpatico Theatre Company and earned her a spot on the 2020 Kilroys List and Table Work Press Recommended list.

Acetone Wishes and Plexiglass Dreams was featured at the Great Plains Theatre Conference and was a semi-finalist for the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center National Playwrights Conference. Half of Chopsticks was a finalist for both the 2021 Bay Area Playwrights Festival and Seven Devils New Plays Conference, and received a stage reading at the inaugural Boise Contemporary Theatre BIPOC Playwrights Festival as well as a reading with A Red Orchid Theatre in Chicago. Whispers of My Sister was workshopped at PlayPenn’s annual New Play Development Conference.

Additional plays have been developed with Texas Tech University WildWind Performance Lab, Chicago's A Red Orchid Theatre, Asian Arts Initiative, Philly Asian American Film Festival, Dragon’s Eye Theatre, PlayPenn, Revamp Collective, and Philadelphia Women’s Theatre Festival. Stephanie is a proud graduate of Bucknell University and received her MFA in Playwriting from Point Park University. She has taught at Swarthmore College, University of the Arts, Bucknell University, Texas Tech University, and currently teaches Creative Writing and Drama at Friends Select School in Philadelphia, PA.

About the 2026 New Play Development Conference

PlayPenn’s nationally recognized New Play Development Conference brings together readings of new plays alongside a citywide series of civic gatherings, workshops, artist exchanges, and public conversations focusing on art, democracy, historical memory, belonging, and collective imagination. This community-focused approach to new play development reflects a broader vision of theatre in a shared civic life that illuminates what theatre can do, who participates in it, how it unfolds, and why it matters. 

The 19-event Conference brings together 22 playwrights participating across workshops, conversations, and five new work presentations while expanding its scope to include an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Eboni Booth (Primary Trust), free playwriting workshops for adults, teens, and women over 50, and a public conversation examining constitutional history and civic identity.

Additional programming includes a community workshop for queer theatre makers; a convening on innovation in theatre-making with leaders from Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Cannonball Festival, Pig Iron Theatre Company, Lemonade Stand, and Tiny Dynamite; and an acting lab focused on approaches to new play development and cross-community exchanges among theatre artists.