BUFFALO, N.Y.: The Alleyway Theatre has named Karissa Murrell Myers the recipient of the 2024 Mazumdar New Play Award. Myers’s award-winning play Black Bear Island shall be produced by the Alleyway of their 2024-25 season.
A panel of 80 theatre artists decided 22 Mazumdar Award semifinalists over the course of a 12 months. The Alleyway inventive crew then chosen Myers’s play along with finalists The Lost Women by Nubia Monks; Six Men Dressed Like Joseph Stalin by Dianne Nora; and Wife of Headless Man Investigates Her Own Disappearance by Yussef El Guindi.
Black Bear Island, a 2024 National Playwrights Conference finalist and Blue Ink Award semifinalist, follows a lady who returns to her hometown within the Pacific Northwest after the mysterious dying of her estranged childhood sweetheart. The Alleyway’s manufacturing of Black Bear Island shall be produced in February 2025, directed by Daniel F. Lendzian.
Mazumdar is a Chicago-based playwright, actor, producer, and casting director and is the co-founding inventive director of Bramble Theatre Company.
The Mazumdar New Play Award has been introduced yearly since 1989 in reminiscence of Canadian actor and playwright Maxim Mazumdar.
NEW HAVEN, CONN.: Keegon Schuett has been awarded this 12 months’s Yale Drama Series Prize for his or her play this dry spell. This 12 months’s successful play was chosen by playwright Jeremy O. Harris from over 2,000 submissions.
Schuett will obtain the $10,000 money award of the David Charles Horn Prize at a ceremony in October, the place the Yale Schwarzman Center and Long Wharf Theatre will maintain a staged studying of this dry spell. The play will then be revealed by Yale University Press.
“Keegon’s this dry spell is an imaginative portrayal of alienation, isolation, conflicted love, metamorphosis, hope, and beauty,” Francine Horn, the director of the David Charles Horn Foundation, mentioned in a press release. “It is an uplifting, poetic piece that merited the Yale Drama Series Prize.”
Schuett is a playwright, filmmaker, and efficiency artist from Tennessee who holds an MFA from Northwestern University. They have had a number of performs for younger audiences revealed by YouthPLAYS.
The Yale Drama Series Prize is run by Yale University Press and the David Charles Horn Foundation.
NEW YORK CITY: The Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF) has introduced the inaugural Abe Burrows Award for Assistant Directors. The first awardees are Violeta Picayo and Sharifa Essa Yasmin.
The new award for early-career administrators comes with an unrestricted comes with an unrestricted money award of $10,000. The awarded assistant administrators should help on work by a Stage Directors and Choreographers Society member between June 2024 and December 2024.
The award is called for the late director and author Abe Burrows, a Tony and Pulitzer Prize awardee.
Picayo is a director, choreographer, and actor whose directing credit embrace La MaMa, the Public Theater, American Repertory Theater, Portland Center Stage, and a number of worldwide venues. She is an organization member of the SuperGeographics and an affiliate artist with SITI Company.
Yasmin is a director, actor, and playwright who was beforehand a nationwide directing fellow with the O’Neill Theater Center. She was the inaugural recipient of the SDCF Barbara Whitman Award in 2021 and her play Close to Home was named to the 2023 Kilroys List. Yasmin holds an MFA from Brown University/Trinity Rep.
CHICAGO: The Joyce Foundation has introduced the recipients of the twentieth annual Joyce Awards. The awards assist artists of colour all through the Great Lakes area within the creation of latest works.
The artist-organization pairs will obtain a $100,000 fee, with at the least $30,000 serving as an artist stipend.
This 12 months’s awardees embrace Andrea Assaf and the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Mich. with the multimedia theatre manufacturing DRONE; musician and composer Marcus Elliott and the Detroit Parks Coalition; playwright and instructing artist Terry Guest and the Chicago Children’s Theatre with the musical Milo Imagines the World, primarily based on the guide by Matt de la Peña and illustrator Christian Robinson; playwright Katie Ka Vang and Saint Paul’s Theater Mu with the theatre mission Hmong Futures; and artist Edra Soto with the Sculpture Center in Cleveland.
The 2024 Joyce Awards have been decided by a panel of arts professionals, together with previous winners.