NATIONWIDE: Julie Taymor has announced the three recipients of the inaugural World Theater Fellowship, a prize for young theatre directors to travel for one year to Central/South America, Africa, Asia, or the Middle East. The winners are Zachary Dorn, Hector Flores Komatsu, and Jesca Prudencio.

“The World Theater Fellowship is designed to allow young theatre directors a year of open research and discovery outside of their own culture,” Taymor said in a statement. “Having spent four years in Indonesia commencing with a one-year Watson Traveling fellowship in my early 20s, I am fully appreciative of an experience that was both challenging and eye-opening. In many ways, it was the foundation for much of my subsequent work in the theatre.”

The recipients were selected after an extensive application and interview process. Each fellowship comes with $30,000, and fellows will begin their travels in September.

Dorn is from St. Petersburg, Fl., and will study traditional Karakuri Ningyo and work with Japanese theatre artists. Komatsu is from Ann Arbor, Mich., and will go to Mexico, where he will explore fiestas and traditions in the country’s rural and indigenous communities. Prudencio is from New York City, and will travel throughout Thailand, Japan, and the Philippines to develop her adaptation of Francisco Balagtas’s poem “Florante at Laura.”