MEET HEATHER HELINSKY: Our Associate Producer for TROUBLE IN MIND

This production could not have been possible without Heather Helinsky!

Meet Heather, our Associate Producer for PAC’s virtual reading of Alice Childress’s TROUBLE IN MIND.

Heather Helinsky (Associate Producer) is a freelance dramaturg based in Philadelphia and the current Literary Manager for Playwrights Foundation/Bay Area Playwrights Festival and the Contest Dramaturg for Jewish Plays Project, with an MFA degree in Dramaturgy & Theatre Studies from A.R.T./Moscow Art Theatre/Harvard. Fifteen years of experience as a professional dramaturg, specifically in the area of new play development, traveling widely around regional theatre, and focused on advocating for women playwrights and writers of color. Since 2010, she’s been a script reader for Sundance Theatre Lab, Seven Devils, Great Plains Theatre Commons, KCACTF, and the O’Neill. Notable production dramaturgy: Caridad Svich’s NNPN rolling world premiere of Guapa, Tira Palmquist’s climate change play Two Degrees at the Denver Center, PTC's production of Terrence McNally's Golden Age, and the development of JT Rogers’ Oslo. Since 2012, she has also been a guest dramaturg and teaching artist for the Kennedy Center, traveling regionally to festivals and reading for the Steinberg/David Mark Cohen award, the VSA Discovery series, and helped curate the Undergraduate Playwrights Workshop under Artistic Director Gregg Henry. In pre-Covid times, she was a Barrymore Judge for Theatre Philadelphia for two concurrent seasons, where she grew tired of how many productions centered on whiteness. 

“...My experience with Alice Childress is seeing her produced at regional festivals through the Kennedy Center’s program. I learned her story of being denied access to her Broadway premiere in the 1950s, not from my academic training program, but by reading KCACTF student dramaturgy production casebooks, and then wondering why Philadelphia hasn’t produced more Black female writers in my own hometown. Dramaturgs question, and we push for more inclusion, and I’m grateful PAC listened.”

PAC's virtual reading for Alice Childress's TROUBLE IN MIND
Saturday, October 24th @ 7pm
FREE to attend; ALL donations benefit BLM Philly