Wendy Wasserstein is the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of The Heidi Chronicles, which also won a Tony Award. Her other plays include The Sisters Rosensweig, Uncommon WomenandOthers, Isn't It Romantic, and An American Daughter. She is also the author of Shiksa Goddess. She lives in New York City.

Moderator: Madeline Puzo, Dean, USC School of Theatre

Creative producer Madeline Puzo is a 23-year veteran of some of the country's leading regional theatres, including the Ahmanson Theatre and the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. Dean Puzo has commissioned and/or produced work by such noted theatre artists as Bill T. Jones, JoAnne Akalaitis, Spalding Gray, Joe Chaikin, Phillip Glass, Femi Osofisan, Girish Karnad, and Robert Woodruff. She has produced such diverse plays as House Arrest: An Introgression, Acts I & II by Anna Deavere Smith; Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by Sir Peter Hall; and David Henry Hwang's new version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song. Her adaptation of Truman Capote's “A Christmas Memory” was presented by the Mark Taper Forum for ten consecutive years and toured Eastern Europe. While director of Taper, Too, the Mark Taper Forum's second theatre, she won nine Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards. Dean Puzo served as artistic counsel for and co-producer of the theatre portion of the Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival. She has been a consultant for the National Endowment of the Arts, the Pew Charitable Trust, Theatre Communications Group, the Rockefeller and Lila Wallace Readers Digest Foundations and has written for American Theatre magazine.