NEW YORK CITY: Playwrights Pearl Cleage and David Greenspan have been announced as the 2025 recipients of the Legacy Playwright Awards. The Legacy Playwrights Initiative (LPI) shines a spotlight on the achievements and influence of playwrights whose work deserves greater visibility, including those who have fallen out of the public eye, and offers a pathway to rediscovery for their bodies of work and financial support for the exigencies of late life. They receive two monetary awards, advocacy for professional theatre production of their work and for the reissuing of previously published plays, programs to raise awareness of their work within the theatre field and in universities, and filmed interviews highlighting their careers. Over the award year, the LPI team works with honorees to tailor this support to their specific needs and current artistic/career goals.
Pearl Cleage is an Atlanta-based writer who serves as Distinguished Artist in Residence at the Alliance Theatre and as Atlanta’s first poet laureate. A graduate of Spelman College, she is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Dramatists Guild and the Paul Robeson Award from the Actor’s Equity Foundation. She is the author of 15 plays, including Blues for An Alabama Sky, which recently concluded a run at London’s National Theatre, and Flyin’ West, which was the most produced new play in the country after it premiered at the Alliance in 1992. She is the author of eight novels, including What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, an Oprah Book Club selection that spent nine weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. Her play Angry, Raucous and Shamelessly Gorgeous, is scheduled for a 2026 production at the Geffen Playhouse, directed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson. She is currently working on a new play, Flying Fish & Folding Money.
David Greenspan has appeared in his plays Dead Mother, She Stoops to Comedy, Go Back to Where You Are, I’m Looking for Helen Twelvetrees, The Memory Motel; his solo plays The Argument and The Myopia; solo renditions of Barry Conners’ comedy The Patsy, Eugene O’Neill’s six-hour drama Strange Interlude and Gertrude Stein’s experimental Four Saints in Three Acts; premieres and revivals, notably Terrence McNally’s Some Men, Jordan Tannahill’s Prince Faggot, Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, Goethe’s Faust, three solo plays: Joey Merlo’s On Set With Theda Bara, Mona Pirnot’s I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan, and Jerry Lieblich’s without mirrors. Honors include Guggenheim, Lortel, and Fox fellowships, Alpert, Lambda Literary, Helen Merrill Playwriting awards, a Ruthie, and six Obies.
NEW YORK CITY: Six writers for the American theatre have been awarded $35,000 Helen Merrill Awards for Playwriting, administered by the New York Community Trust. This year’s winners are Jonathan Payne, Lisa Sanaye Dring, Monet Hurst-Mendoza, Jennifer Kidwell, Rehana Mirza, and Ifeoluwa Olujobi. They represent a cross-section of the field, with writers whose work spans from Broadway to experimental theatre, from groundbreaking new plays to award-winning TV series. They will be honored on October 17 in a celebration at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater.
The late theatrical agent Helen Merrill created this fund in 1999 to help playwrights explore their unique visions without the burden of financial pressures. Since then, the fund has made 115 awards totaling more than $2.6 million to writers with singular voices whose work is shaping the future of the stage, identified by a panel of leading theatre professionals.
PHILADELPHIA: On Oct. 20, Theatre Philadelphia’s Barrymore Awards celebrated the best of the 2024-25 theatre season in Philadelphia. Top winners were The Comeuppance at the Wilma Theater for Best Overall Production of a Play and Poor Judge at Pig Iron Theatre Company for Best Overall Production of a Musical. Best Direction of a Play went to Amina Robinson for her work on Intimate Apparel at Arden Theatre Company. Kyle Metzger was recognized for Best Direction of a Musical for Drip at Inis Nua Theatre Company. Acting awards for performances in plays included Matteo Scammell and Jered McLenigan, who both were awarded for their leading roles in Rift, or White Lies at InterAct Theatre Company. For musical leads, recipients were Max Gallagher for Drip at Inis Nua Theatre Company and Danny Wilfred for Gay Mis at Jaffe St. Queer Productions.
In awards for original work, Alex Bechtel received two awards, for music directing Pig Iron’s Poor Judge and for her original score on Peter Panto: A Musical Panto at People’s Light. Iraisa Ann Reilly was recognized for outstanding original production for her play January 6: A Celebration. A Bodega Princess Remembers Tradition, Not Insurrection at Simpatico Theatre. The Philadelphia Award for Social Insight, which acknowledges a production from any period or genre that demonstrates how theatre illuminates the way we live, interact with others, and build community, went to Nichos at Esperanza Arts Center. All Barrymore Awards recipients can be found here.
NEW YORK CITY: Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF), the not-for-profit foundation of Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), has announced that director Bartlett Sher will be honored with SDCF’s “Mr. Abbott” Award. This award, given in honor of director George Abbott, recognizes a director or choreographer for their outstanding contributions to Broadway. It will be presented at the foundation’s gala on March 23, 2026 at Gotham Hall in New York City.
Sher was nominated for the Tony Award nine times and won for his 2008 revival of South Pacific for Lincoln Center Theater, where he was recently named executive producer. Other Broadway credits at Lincoln Center include The Light in the Piazza, which premiered at Intiman Theatre; revivals of The King and I and My Fair Lady; the Tony-winning Best Play, Oslo by J.T. Rogers; and Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, which became the best-selling American play in Broadway history. In opera, he has directed classics and new work. Most recently, he directed the world premiere of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay for the Met Opera.
CHICAGO: The Chicago-based nonprofit 3Arts has announced that it will award more than $1 million in grants to artists this fall, including 17 artists who will receive $30,000 in unrestricted 3Arts Awards grants in partnership with Artspace Southern Illinois. Theatre artists awarded grants include production designer Nina Castillo-D’Angier; actor and playwright Rommel Chan; movement artist, physical theatre creator, and puppeteer Chih-Jou Cheng; teacher, puppet artist, designer, and director Tom Lee; and playwright, essayist, and dramaturg Kristin Idascak. They will be honored in a ceremony at Chicago’s Harris Theater on Nov. 10.
AKRON, OH.: The National Center for Choreography-Akron (NCCAkron) has announced choreographers Alice Sheppard (based in New York City and Los Altos, California) and Laurel Lawson (based in Atlanta), the leaders of disability arts company Kinetic Light, as the recipients of the $50,000 Knight Choreography Prize. Made possible by the Knight Foundation, this award supports the artistic experimentation and career longevity of choreographers in the United States. It provides essential time and space for the creative process, research, rigorous play, and positive failure. The award celebrates choreographers who provide significant contributions to the dance field, expand audiences for dance, and ensure the artform has a prominent place in U.S. culture.
Founded in 2016 by Sheppard, Kinetic Light is an internationally renowned disability arts company known for ambitious, immersive multimedia performance works that emerge from disability culture and are centered in Kinetic Light’s signature approach to aesthetically and artistically equitable access. Laurel Lawson is a choreographer, designer, and artist-engineer who leads Kinetic Light research and development initiatives in tech, access software and product development, and access education curriculum Access ALLways. Alice Sheppard is the artistic director of Kinetic Light, as well as a choreographer, dancer, arts researcher, writer, and speaker.
NEW YORK CITY: The Dramatists Guild Foundation (DGF) has announced that playwright, journalist, multimedia artist, and 2014-15 DGF fellow Aurin Squire is the recipient of the 2025 Thom Thomas Award, given annually to an alumnus of the DGF Fellows program who demonstrates great artistic skill. Since 2016, DGF has given this award to commemorate playwright Thom Thomas’s passion for nurturing the next generation of dramatists and his appreciation of DGF’s support for writers. The award grants the recipient $10,000 to use toward livelihood, project, and travel expenses, and more. Squire wrote the book for the Tony-nominated Broadway musical A Wonderful World and won the Helen Merrill Prize for Emerging Playwrights, as well as Seattle Public Theater’s Emerald Prize for new American plays. He graduated from the Juilliard School after a two-year fellowship in the Lila Acheson American Playwriting Program. Squire has had fellowships at the Dramatists Guild of America, National Black Theatre, Royal Court Theatre, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange.
NEW YORK CITY: The Entertainment Community Fund (formerly the Actors Fund), the national human services organization supporting the needs of those working in performing arts and entertainment, has announced the five recipients of the Alex Dubé Scholarship Program. Claire Glavin, Jacob Gutierrez, Fatima Logan-Alston, Beth Maslinoff, and Betsy Schaefer were awarded one-time $10,000 scholarships each to assist in tuition payment for accredited graduate degree programs. Through these scholarships, Career Transition For Dancers (a program of the Entertainment Community Fund) supports the education of dancers to build their next professional platforms.
NEW YORK CITY: IndieSpace, along with the Howard Gilman Foundation, has announced the recipients of The Little Venue That Could grant program, which offers two-year $10,000 grants to NYC-based performance venues with annual budgets under $500,000. They are Brooklyn Art Haus, Dixon Place, Green Space, Inspiration Point, IRT Theater, New Perspectives Studio, Noosphere Arts (Noo Arts), QED Astoria, St. Lydia’s, and the Little Victory Theatre. A weighted lottery system was used to determine grantees, with priority given to venues in the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island; venues whose NEA funding was withdrawn or terminated; venues who were established by, for, and are serving historically excluded artists; and who demonstrate values-driven work through community impact, board, and staff diversity and accessibility. This year, the program received 62 applications. IndieSpace is an organization established to disrupt the ongoing displacement of small theatres and to create a new model for equitable funding for the indie theatre community.
NEW YORK CITY: The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA) has announced the 35 artists who will receive its 2025 Creative Research Grants. Launched in 2024, the program awards $10,000 grants to artists to support critical, exploratory stages of the artistic process—assisting experimental artists in advancing their ideas and practices. The grants address a persistent gap in support for research and exploration: activities that are central to artistic development but rarely funded.
The program is part of a 10-year plan (2025-34) to expand FCA’s grantmaking, which was made possible by a transformative bequest from the estate of Margo Leavin, a pioneering L.A. gallerist and longtime supporter of FCA’s work. Working across a range of practices—including dance, music/sound, performance, poetry, and visual arts—the 35 awarded artists plan to pursue archival research and field work, collaboration across disciplines and cultures, focused study and studio time, material exploration and experimentation, and travel across the United States and to 15 countries and territories. They include the following theatre artists:
- Ian Andrew Askew, an artist working in music and performance, will develop a new interactive sonic instrument and performance installation exploring the mosh pit as a site of ritual and release, called the SLAMDANCE pit simulator.
- Comedic performer and writer Morgan Bassichis will begin their research for a new performance about Amy Winehouse, revisiting Winehouse’s first show in the U.S. (at Joe’s Pub in 2007) and participate in fan-led walking tours in London.
- Choreographer and performance artist mayfield brooks will study mouth anatomy with a vocal coach and a dentist (among others), and travel to the Azores to pursue an open water diving certification and research underwater sound, breath, and movement for a sonic dance project titled dArk oXyGen.
- Choreographer and creator Rashida Bumbray will develop a new performance work inspired by the porch parties of Piedmont Blues musician and dancer Algia Mae Hinton in North Carolina.
- Yanira Castro, an interdisciplinary artist, will travel to Puerto Rico to study traditional Vejigante mask-making alongside local artists.
- Erin Markey, a performance artist, will embark on a yearlong, collaborative experiment in deepening their musicianship—through piano, voice, and composition—to support their embodied, somatic approach to songwriting and live performance.
- Jessica Mehta, a poet and interdisciplinary artist, will research the origins and cultural implications of the Cherokee tear dress to develop a public installation and ceremonial burn on July 4, 2026. Mehta will relocate to the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma to access archives, sewing classes, and work with elder tear dress designers to investigate the dress as a symbol.
- Buffy, an artist and musician, will research transfeminist aesthetic lineages through experimental and electronic musical composition, developing work that sonifies transbiological and cosmological data from medical and personal archives. The grant will support her travel to Barcelona.
- Writer, composer, and performer Ahamefule Oluo will research the 1889 workers’ riot on Navassa Island, examining the Black community’s social and political context in the late 1800s to develop a new musical about race, freedom, and the founding of the American empire.
