DONNA ABELA is an award-winning playwright. Her play Jump For Jordan won the 2013 Griffin Playwriting Award and the 2015 Australian Writers’ Guild’s AWGIE Award for Stage. It is on the HSC Drama Syllabus, was one of three Australian plays presented in Spanish at the 2018 Women Playwright’s International Conference in Santiago de Chile, and was the creative component of her 2016 doctoral thesis entitled Dialogic Interplay: a Strategy for Representing Difference and Cultural Diversity on Stage. Other recent plays include Monkey ... Journey to the West (2014 Brisbane Festival, 2015 Melbourne Festival, 2015 Sydney Opera House programs), Spirit (2016 AWGIE Award for Radio), Aurora’s Lament (2012 AWGIE Award for Radio), and Mrs Macquarie’s Cello (2010 AWGIE Award for Radio). Donna supports the development of new performance works, and leads processes that leverage the creative proficiency and resilience of writers. In the last year, she has taught, mentored or provided dramaturgy to over a hundred student, emerging and professional writers for screen and stage. She is a founding member and board member of PYT | Fairfield. Along with Vanessa Bates, Hilary Bell, Noëlle Janaczeska, Verity Laughton, Ned Manning and Cath Zimdahl, she is also a founding member of 7-ON, a playwrights’ alliance which advocates for playwrights and initiates production and publishing projects.