Wendy A. Schmidt (she/her) is a playwright, theatre producer, and visual artist. Past lives as a devout Christian and as a painter inform her work today. She is fascinated with perception and how people construct worlds to live in together. She usually writes about how Capitalism directly conflicts with every Christian value she’s ever had. Example: The Ostrich is a play in which the Wright Brothers arrive in present-day Ostrich, IN to build an airstrip, and shenanigans ensue in the name of progress. This is her third production at Berger Park, and her first with the amazing Eileen Tull. Other productions include This Music Should Not Be at RhinoFest (2024), about the self-alienation of technology; her one-woman play Maker of Worlds starring Amy Gorelow at Theater for the New City’s Dream-Up Festival (NYC) (2019), about the toxic marriage of Capitalism and religion; and Marvelous Madeleines at Berger Park Coach House (2016), a rom-com about two companies who fall in love and get married now that Citizens United has made it legal. During the pandemic, her shorts Charles Darwin and Modernity of the Soul were produced in the Planet Connections (NYC) Zoomfest, and her films were part of the TUTA Lab Global One Minute Project. She once almost won an award, and was runner up or rejected for any number of other things. She formed The Terror Cottas in 2022 to build audience and create performance opportunities for the work of experimental playwrights. Educational highlights include a BFA in drawing from Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, philosophy classes at Marquette and DePaul, the La MaMa Umbria Playwrights Retreat x3, playwriting at Chicago Dramatists, and acting at Piven Theater Workshop, Green Shirt Studios, and TUTA.