Tom Hanks is an award-winning actor, producer, and director. One of only two actors in history to win back-to-back Academy Awards for Best Actor in a Leading Role, he won his first Oscar in 1994 for his moving portrayal of AIDS-stricken lawyer Andrew Beckett in Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia. The following year, he took home his second Oscar for his unforgettable performance in the title role of Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump. He also won Golden Globe Awards for both films, as well as a SAG Award for the latter.

Hanks has also been honored with Academy Award nominations for his performances in Penny Marshall’s Big, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, Robert Zemeckis’s Cast Away, and, most recently, for his portrayal of Fred Rogers in Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. He also won Golden Globes for Big and Cast Away.

In 2013, Hanks made his Broadway debut in the Nora Ephron-penned play Lucky Guy. His performance earned him Drama Desk, Drama League, Outer Critics Circle, and Tony Award nominations. He is also the author of a best-selling collection of stories titled Uncommon Type and later, in 2023, he published his first full-length novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, which was a New York Times bestseller and was also recognized by NPR as Best Book of the Year.

Hanks has received the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002, the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Chaplin Award in 2009, a Kennedy Center Honor in 2014, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.

James Glossman has adapted novels and stories by Twain, Fitzgerald, Welty, Poe, O. Henry, Thurber, Barthelme, and Joyce; as well as Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Faulkner’s The Hamlet, and Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. His stage version of Raymond Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business premiered at Portland Stage Company, which hosted a workshop of an earlier version of This World of Tomorrow as part of their 2024 Little Festival of the Unexpected.

In addition to the previous Hanks & Glossman play, Safe Home (2022), his most recent is the music-theater piece Shostakovich and the Black Monk: A Russian Fantasy, performed by the Grammy-winning Emerson String Quartet and a rotating cast including David Strathairn, Jay O. Sanders, Len Cariou, Jeffrey DeMunn, Richard Thomas, and Sean Astin, in concert halls from Tanglewood to Korea. An invited reading of his stage adaptation of The Door Into Summer, Robert A. Heinlein’s classic science fiction noir, was presented at the Ed Sullivan Theater with a cast including Jeff DeMunn and Stephen Colbert. In a collaboration over three decades, adapted and directed author and journalist Jim Lehrer’s novels Kick the Can, The Special Prisoner, and Flying Crows. Glossman’s new musical, with composer/lyricist Kingsley Day, of Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche will have its world premiere in Chicago in spring 2026. Dramatists Guild, AEA, SDC.

He is on the faculty of Theatre Arts & Studies, Johns Hopkins, and runs the drama program at Far Brook School. He is a graduate of Northwestern, ACT, BADA-Oxford, and Yale School of Drama.

Kenny Leon is a Tony Award-winning director. Broadway credits include Othello; Our Town; HOME; Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch; Topdog/Underdog; Ohio State Murders; A Soldier’s Play; American Son; Children of a Lesser God; Holler If Ya Hear Me; A Raisin in the Sun; The Mountaintop; Stick Fly; and August Wilson’s Fences, Gem of the Ocean, and Radio Golf. Off-Broadway: King James; The Underlying Chris; Everybody’s Ruby; Emergence-See! (The Public); and Smart People (Second Stage). Opera: Margaret Garner. Television: Robin Roberts Presents: Mahalia; Colin in Black & White; 4400; Amend: The Fight for America; American Son (adapted for Netflix); Hairspray Live!; The Wiz Live!; Steel Magnolias; Dynasty; and In My Dreams. He is the author of Take You Wherever You Go, artistic director emeritus of Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre Company, and senior resident director of Roundabout Theatre Company. Awards include Obie, Actors Fund Medal of Honor, George Abbott Lifetime Achievement for American Theatre, and Jason Robards Award for Excellence in Theatre.

Alex Poots is a widely acclaimed arts and cultural leader who has built major new organizations from the ground up, and who has inspired established organizations to reshape their familiar approaches into more innovative, popular and culturally democratic programs.

Poots was appointed in 2015 as the founding artistic director and CEO of The Shed in NYC, following a decade creating, launching and leading Manchester International Festival (MIF) in the UK. At these organizations, as well at Park Avenue Armory in NYC, the Barbican Centre and Tate Galleries in London, Poots has conceived and developed new ways for arts organizations to realize their missions and visions—commissioning and presenting established and early-career artists and creatives across disciplines and regions, often in new collaborations, and welcoming a range of audiences of all backgrounds to discover their work. In 2023 Poots continued his role as The Shed’s founding artistic director and set up a new kind of production house called North Star Studio.

Poots has forged enduring and fruitful relationships with the artists and creatives with whom he works—from composers to pop artists, theater directors to filmmakers, writers to visual artists, technologists to academics. In the process, he has supported them to evolve artistic formats and realize ambitious projects, drawing large audiences in the process. By questioning established artistic structures and societal constructs, Poots works to bring together creative practices and audiences in new combinations—facilitating, originating, and promoting artistic invention, interdisciplinary practice, and transformative programs through the organizations he leads.