Chapel is a new programming language being developed by Cray Inc. as part of the DARPA-led High Productivity Computing Systems program (HPCS). Chapel strives to increase productivity for supercomputer users by supporting higher levels of abstraction compared to current parallel programming models while also supporting the ability to optimize for performance that meets or surpasses current technologies. Chapel is designed for portability -- from desktop multicore workstations to commodity clusters to the high-end machines developed by Cray and our competitors. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the Chapel language, including motivating philosophies and recent work on user-defined data distributions. I'll also mention several opportunities for collaboration and future work.