CARMEL DEAN is an Australian-born musician based in New York. Her compositional debut, Renascence, (with a book by Tony Award-nominee Dick Scanlan) was recently produced Off-Broadway by the acclaimed theatre company Transport Group, and subsequently won the 2018 Off-Broadway Alliance Award for Best New Musical. Her song cycle Well-Behaved Women, about bad-ass, game-changing historical women, premiered at Joe’s Pub in January 2020 to sold-out performances, and is soon to be licensed by Concord Theatricals. As a Broadway Musical Director/Supervisor and/or Arranger, Carmel’s credits include If/Then (starring Idina Menzel), American Idiot, Hands on a Hardbody, and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. She is the Musical Supervisor/Arranger/Co-Orchestrator of the upcoming Broadway musical The Notebook (with a score by Ingrid Michaelson). Other roles include Vocal Arranger for jam-band Phish and Trey Anastasio (Madison Square Garden; Las Vegas; Chicago’s Wrigley Field); performer with Green Day on the 52ndAnnual Grammy Awards; and former musical director for Broadway legend Chita Rivera. Carmel is a Fulbright Scholar, holds an MFA from New York University’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program, and is a current member of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Workshop.

MINDI DICKSTEIN is an award-winning lyricist, librettist, and playwright. She is perhaps best known as the lyricist for the Broadway musical Little Women, which has been performed worldwide. She is currently writing lyrics for Benny & Joon, based on the MGM film, which had its world premiere at the Old Globe Theater, and for The Little Prince, a multimedia musical which will premiere internationally in 2022. Recent projects include book and lyrics for Trip, commissioned by Playwrights Horizons in New York, book for Toy Story - The Musical for Disney, and two short plays written for Climate Change Theater Action, a biannual event in support of heightening awareness of the worldwide climate change crisis. Her short story, The Essential Guide to Happiness, written for the collection Hello Winter, is now available on Amazon.com. Mindi’s work has been developed at NAMT, Theatreworks Silicon Valley, Second Stage, The Women’s Project, Playwrights Horizons, Rhinebeck Writer’s Retreat, and The Goodspeed Johnny Mercer Colony. Her work has been performed widely at such venues as The Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center’s American Songbook (Hear and Now: Contemporary Lyricists), The Dramatists Guild’s Great Writer’s Thank Their Lucky Stars, The Lilly Awards, and 54 Below. She has received a Larson Foundation Award, Massachusetts Artists and New York Foundation for the Arts Playwriting Fellowships, the Second Stage Constance Klinsky Award for Excellence in Musical Theatre, and a PEN International New Playwright Award (selected by Wendy Wasserstein). She was an Oscar Hammerstein Fellow at the NYU Graduate Musical Theater Writing program, where she received her MFA and now serves on the faculty.