New York Theatre Experience, Inc.

MARTIN DENTON is the founder, editor, and chief reviewer of nytheatre.com. He is the Executive Director of nytheatre.com's nonprofit parent organization, The New York Theatre Experience, Inc. (NYTE); the editor of NYTE's annual Plays and Playwrights anthologies, along with the collections Playing with Canons and Unpredictable Plays; and the founding producer of nytheatrecast, NYC's first original, regularly scheduled theatre podcast. He also designs and codes all of NYTE's websites. In 2011, Martin became founding editor and curator of Indie Theater Now(http://www.indietheaternow.com/) , a new website that's being described as "iTunes for plays."

I love great theater. I’m one of the luckiest people I know,  because I get to spend my days toiling at the thing I love. Only it doesn’t  feel like toil at all. When we started NYTE, back in July 1999, we knew that we wanted  nytheatre.com, to  be a force for letting the world know about great theater—where to find it, how  to get to it, who is making it. We quickly realized we needed to level the playing field, focusing our resources and attention on the important but  underfunded and generally neglected indie theater sector. Indie theater is not  only where almost all playwrights, directors, producers, designers, actors, and  other theater artists learn their craft; it is also where great theater—inventive,  groundbreaking, envelope-pushing, barrier-smashing, edge-of-the-seat amazing  theater—lives and thrives. And so nytheatre.com became the internet’s nexus of  indie theater coverage. Along the way, we pioneered a number of innovations--the first all-volunteer/all-theater-artist reviewing squad,  drawing from the ranks of actors, playwrights, and directors whose work we knew  and respected; produced the first original podcast series devoted to the NYC  theater scene. And—for 11 years running —  reviewed every show in America’s  largest performing arts festival, FringeNYC. In 2000 we published Plays  and Playwrights for the New Millennium, the first of an annual series of play  anthologies introducing the works of new indie playwrights to the  mainstream. In 2006, we organized the First Ever Indie Theater  Convocation, bringing together hundreds of artists to network and  advance mutually beneficial opportunities leading to the creation of  the League of Independent Theater,  the only advocacy organization  specifically for the roughly 50,000 indie  theater/performing arts population of NYC. Last year, we launched Indie Theater Now, an enormous  expansion of our mission to bring attention to the canon of American indie  theater. .