Brendan Griffith was elected President of the New York City Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO in July 2025. He joined the NYCCLC in 2009 and had previously been its Chief of Staff since 2011. He is also a proud member of Iron Workers Local 40 and the United University Professions.

Brendan’s work has involved coordination of various CLC programs as well as oversight of day to day operations, but some of his most rewarding efforts have been his work on the Annual Workers Memorial Day Commemoration, the Annual Commemoration to the 146 victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, and the CLC’s Annual Labor Day Parade.

He currently serves on the boards of the American Labor Museum – Botto House and the Worker Justice Project. He is on the Advisory Board of the Mount Sinai Selikoff Center for Occupational Health and serves as Vice Chair of the Board of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety & Health. Additionally, Brendan is an Adjunct Instructor at SUNY Empire State College’s Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies.

Brendan completed an apprenticeship with Iron Workers Local 40, is a graduate of the NYS AFL-CIO/Cornell Union Leadership Institute and is also a graduate of Fordham University where he majored in Political Science.

Gregory Mosher is the former Director of the Lincoln Center Theater and Artistic Director of Goodman theater in Chicago. He has produced and/or directed over 200 plays, nearly half of which were world or American premieres, at those theaters and from Broadway and London’s West End to South African townships. He focused on new work, accessibility – Member tickets to Lincoln Center Theater were $10 during his tenure – and diverse programming. He worked with many of the 20^th century’s legendary theater artists, including Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Leonard Bernstein, and the Nobel Prizewinners Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, and Samuel Beckett. Mosher presented the premieres of new plays by David Mamet, Richard Nelson, John Leguizamo, John Guare, and Spalding Gray, including the premieres of Sarafina!, Freak, Six Degrees of Separation, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston’s Mule Bone, Glengarry Glen Ross, and many more. He currently serves as Executive Director of Hunter College’s Office of the Arts. 

Kevin R. Free has been making theater in New York City for 30 years and narrating audiobooks for 25 years. He was the first black man to play Bellomy in The Fantasticks in the production’s 57-year run Off-Broadway. He won an Obie Award as the Producing Artistic Director of The Fire This Time Festival in 2015, for producing world premiere plays of playwrights of the African Diaspora. He was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile Magazine in 2023. In 2024, his play, Swimming Uphill, written for André De Shields and directed by Zhailon Levingston, received a New Works Lab fellowship at the Apollo. He is the former Artistic Director of Mile Square Theatre, where,  in his 3-year tenure, he produced four world premiere plays, including Gabriel Diego Hernandez’s Quarter Rican. This is his 8th joyful collaboration with The Working Theater and his brother Reynaldo Piniella.  Instagram: @kevinrfree www.kevinrfree.com

Reynaldo Piniella is excited to be co-hosting the Working Theater’s Gala for the sixth year in a row! In 2021, he was in the acting company of two Broadway shows at the same time: Thoughts of a Colored Man and Trouble in Mind. His Off-Broadway acting credits include work at Signature Theatre Company, The Public Theater, the Working Theater, Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA), and Rattlestick Theater, regionally with Baltimore Center Stage, Syracuse Stage, Long Wharf Theatre, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Cleveland Play House, NY Stage and Film, Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, and Actors Theatre of Louisville, and internationally with the Sundance Theatre Lab in Morocco and NEAP Fest in Rio de Janeiro. TV credits include Reservation Dogs, Sneaky Pete, Law & Order: SVU, The Carrie Diaries,  Flesh & Bone, Blue Bloods, Greenleaf, Louie, NYC 22, Us & Them, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. @ReynaldoRey. www.reynaldopiniella.com

Lauren Patten (she/her) was the breakout star of the musical Jagged Little Pill, for which she won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, as well as the Grammy and Drama Desk Awards. Other stage credits include Fun Home on Broadway, and the off-Broadway productions of The Counterfeit Opera (Little Island), The Lonely Few (MCC), The Wolves (Playwrights’ Realm; Drama Desk and Obie Awards), and Days of Rage (Second Stage). On television, Lauren starred in the Hulu original series Death and Other Details, and is known for her work on Blue Bloods (CBS), The Good Fight (Paramount+), and Succession (HBO). She is featured in the upcoming Amazon series Off Campus. @pattenlauren