Speed of Light

Bella Poynton is a playwright, director, performance studies scholar from from Buffalo, NY. Her creative work has been published with Samuel French at Concord Theatricals, and can be seen in The Best Ten-Minute Plays of 2019, The Best Ten-Minute Plays of 2024, The Best Men’s Monologues of 2024, The Best American Short Plays 2018-2019, The Weirdest Plays of 2020, and WE-US: Monologues for Gender Minority Characters, Fleas on the Dog Literary Magazine 14, and CLOCKHOUSE. Her scholarly work has been published in Comparative Drama, Theatre/Practice, Global Performance Studies, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and Texas Theatre Journal. Bella's plays have been produced and developed at Alleyway Theatre, The Great Plains Theatre Festival, Road Less Traveled Productions, MadLab Theatre, 3rd Act Theatre Company, Otherworld Theatre, The Bechdel Group, Theatre Viscera, Pittsburgh New Play Festival, Kitchen Theatre Company, Plays in Bloom Residency, and the Sam French OOB Festival among many others. Bella is the senior co-chair of the Playwriting Symposium at the Mid America Theatre Festival, the director of the Playwrights’ Wing at First Look Buffalo Theatre Company, a co-editor of Interventions at Contemporary Theatre Review, was a Regional Playwriting Resident at Road Less Traveled Productions from 2016-2018, and is the founder of Queen City Playwrights, Buffalo New York's only new play development workshop for career playwrights. Her scholarly research interests include new play development, object oriented ontology, technology, robotics, cyberculture, and posthuman performance. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Playwrights Workshop and a PhD in Performance Studies from the University at Buffalo.