We’re BETTY
Shelby Richardson
Shelby (they/them) is an artist living and working in south minneapolis. Shelby believes that collaboration is a way of life and is thrilled to be working in collaboration with other theater artists, film people, writers, musicians, animals, planets and stars. They attended Idyllwild Arts Academy, attained a BFA from the university of minnesota guthrie theater program, and their work has been featured in Ars Nova’s AntFest, the Illusion theater, the Jungle theater, Heart of the Beast puppet and mask theater, and Open Eye figure theater. They have been in over 20 productions as an actor in the Twin Cities and were a co-founder of the for-profit art business WeAreMarried Performance Co. from 2021-2024 where they devised, wrote and directed four full-length, innovative clown shows. They are also an astrologer.
MK Tuomanen
MK (they/them) is a physical theater maker educated at the Lecoq School of Movement Theater, named “Best Theater Artist” by Philadelphia Magazine in 2015. They have performed their original solo work at the Kimmel Center, Penn Radicals Conference, FringeArts, the Fabric Workshop Museum, the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Red Eye Theater and Bloomsberg Theatre Ensemble. A winner of the Haas Emerging Artist Award in 2017, they are a company member of Applied Mechanics immersive theatre collective, an alum of Interact Core Writers, an associated artist with the Bearded Ladies experimental queer cabaret and a founding member of Philadelphia’s first producing playwright’s collective, Orbiter 3. With Orbiter 3, they won the Philadelphia Award for the production of their play Peaceable Kingdom in 2017. As a director, their work has been seen at Edinburgh Fringe (Chris Davis’ Drunk Lion, Violence of the Lambs, and others), as well as the Guggenheim Works And Process, Under the Radar at LaMAMA, Cultural DC and Woolly Mammoth (Rose Jarboe’s Rose: You Are Who You Eat). They completed their Jerome Fellowship at the Playwright’s Center in 2025 and recently won the Terrence McNally Award for their play, Night Science. www.mkplays.com
Paul William Kruse
Paul (he/him) tells Queer love stories. As a playwright and media artist from Western Wisconsin, his work flows from his Midwestern roots and ever-evolving experience of family. Paul often writes collaboratively, drawing from his years of experience as a videographer and documentarian. He was a 2023–2025 Jerome Fellow at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis and a cohort member of Audible’s third Emerging Playwrights Fund. His audio play Once Removed was an official selection at the 2022 Tribeca Festival. Paul’s plays have been produced by Adjusted Realists in Brooklyn, NY; Quantum Theatre in Pittsburgh, PA; the Vortex Theater in Austin, TX; and in high schools around the country. Paul has developed work at The Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, Yaddo, the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, and Middlebury College. Paul completed his MFA at UT Austin in 2020, where he was a fellow with the Michener Center for Writers. From 2012–2022, Paul was resident playwright with Pittsburgh’s Hatch Arts Collective, which he co-founded with Adil Mansoor and Nicole Shero. www.paulwkruse.com