"This summer we had 41 young people in our program who wrote a play and performed it in the street. We had a running crew, our trainees, who set up the whole stage. Out of that group, we have eight young people writing plays now. I'm convinced they will be the next playwrights."

For thirteen years, Ellen Gavin has been giving a voice to women in the theater arts. As the founder and Artistic Director of Brava! for Women in the Arts, Ms. Gavin has nurtured the works of playwrights such as Cherrie Moraga, Cheylene Lee, Naomi Iizuka, Irene Fornes, and Suzan-Lori Parks, as well as hundreds of other women playwrights and performers.

When 75 women showed up for their first meeting at La Galeria de la Raza in 1986, Gavin focused on a singular dream: to buy a 1927 Vaudeville house in the San Francisco Mission District and transform it into a first-class small theater. Through her leadership, Brava! has so far raised $1.4 million to renovate the building this year. The York Theater sign will come down and the Brava Theater Center sign will adorn the newly refurbished building some time in the year 2000.

Gavin found and fine-tuned her voice through early activism in college and three years as one of the first female firefighters in the country. Since moving to the Bay Area, she has encouraged women, people of color, and gay/lesbian artists to realize some form of artistic expression through the world of theater arts.

Her own play, Modotti: An Exquisite Aperture, will be premiered at Brava! next year. Ms. Gavin is also writing a screen adaptation of Erika Lopez' novel, They Call Me Mad Dog, to be directed by the award-winning filmmaker Lourdes Portillo.

For more information about Brava! for Women in the Arts go to http://www.brava.org.