HUNTER HIGGS - Key Persons
Dan Hunter is a playwright, songwriter, teacher and founding partner of Hunter Higgs, LLC. Hunter is the inventor of H-IQ, the first assessment of individual imagination and ideation. He is the co-author of A New Measure of Imagination Ability: Anatomical Brain Imaging Correlates, published March 22, 2016 in The Frontiers of Psychology, an international, peer-reviewed journal.
Hunter has 25 years of experience in politics and arts advocacy, serving as Executive Director of the Massachusetts Advocates for the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (MAASH), a statewide advocacy and education group, and as Director of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs, a cabinet appointment requiring Senate confirmation. He has also taught creative writing at Boston University since 2000.
Hunter has written many successful plays including Un Tango en La Noche (winner of a national Kennedy Center award) and The Monkey King (finalist for the 2004 Heideman Award, Actors Theatre of Louisville). Hunter's play, Red Elm, received critical acclaim in 2005 and his 2013 comedy, Legally Dead, was called "uproarious" by the Boston Globe.
Hathalee has seventeen years of experience working with nonprofit cultural organizations in Vermont and Massachusetts. For two years, she served as Development Director of MAASH (Massachusetts Advocates for the Arts, Sciences & Humanities). She also formed Emerging Arts Leaders of Massachusetts (EALM), a career development and advocacy group for young arts professionals in the Boston cultural community.
From 1999 to 2007, Hathalee was Producing Director of Kingdom County Productions (KCP), an independent film production company and nonprofit media arts organization in northern Vermont. Hathalee worked with award-winning filmmakers Jay Craven and Bess O'Brien to produce dozens of projects, most notably the feature films Disappearances (Kris Kristofferson, Genevieve Bujold) and The Year That Trembled (Fred Willard, Jonathan Brandis), and seven episodes of "Windy Acres," an Emmy Award-winning comedy series for Vermont Public Television.
Hathalee was also Administrative Director of Fledgling Films, Kingdom County Productions' educational division. She produced five years of the Fledgling Films Summer Institute, an intensive writing and production program for teenagers, during which 25 short narrative films and five documentaries were made with young filmmakers.
Hathalee earned a Masters in Arts Administration from Boston University and a B.A. from the University of Virginia.