2026 PRODUCTION TEAM
Peihwen Tai
Producer
Peihwen J. Tai (she/her) is a Taiwanese/Canadian writer and performer pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. She also holds a double-major BFA in Theatre Acting and Japanese from UBC. With her play Moth Boy (dir. Tetsuro Shigematsu), she is the youngest and first playwright to receive a new play development at the University of the Fraser Valley since the 1980s. Peihwen is also the writer and co-director of the in-production short film Pretty Boy$, which is about a fictional K-pop-inspired boy band. The film won the inaugural 2025 Pitch Competition at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival. You can catch her as one of the principals in The Little Mermaid with the Royal Canadian Theatre Company at the end of 2025 and early 2026. When Peihwen is not working in the arts, she likes to hang out with her cat Sticky and stay up all night playing video games.
Nina Legesse
Production Manager
Nina Legesse (she/her) is a playwright, screenwriter, actor, and musician. Having participated in the 2025 festival as a playwright, Nina is eager to be behind the scenes this year to help bring student work to the stage. Nina wrote and co-directed Free Hilda (Bottom's Up Theatre, 2021) in Glasgow, UK. Her short film screenwriting credits include Our Friend Chris (Run N Gun finalist, 2025) and Take Out Captive (2025). In Edmonton, she performed as Lil Inez in Hairspray (Mayfield Dinner Theatre) and starred in several Theatre Picarts productions, including Amadeus, In the Heights, and The Wiz. She has also written and produced several singles as a recording artist.
Frances Koncan
Faculty Advisor
Frances Koncan (she/they) is an Anishinaabe and Slovene playwright from Couchiching First Nation and Assistant Professor of Playwriting at UBC. They hold a BA in Psychology from the University of Manitoba and an MFA in Playwriting from the City University of New York Brooklyn College. Their work as a playwright includes Women of the Fur Trade, Space Girl, and zahgidiwin/love. Instagram/TikTok: @franceskoncan
Danielle Sherman
Associate Producer
Danielle Sherman (she/her) is a Jewish-American writer pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. She holds a BA in English & Creative Writing from Emory University. Her stories, essays, and poems have been published in or recognized by The North American Review, The Masters Review, The Los Angeles Review, Stanford University’s Caesura, and After Happy Hour, among other publications. She is the recent recipient of the Sudler Prize, the Artistine Mann Award in creative nonfiction, and the Grace Abernethy Scholarship in cross-genre writing. Her play Un-American Activities was performed at Emory University’s Lenaia Playwriting Festival, through which she also directed. She serves as a prose reader for the Adroit Journal.