NEW YORK CITY: Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Youngblood, an OBIE-winning collective of emerging professional playwrights, has announced new members for the 2025-26 season. Now in its 32nd year, Youngblood aims to provide a creative home for the next generation of theatre artists through artistic guidance, peer support, regular feedback, and a fertile development environment for member playwrights to explore their craft.
The new group includes Davis Alianiello, a playwright, director, dramaturg, and teacher, originally from Providence, Rhode Island; Messiah Cristine, a recent graduate of the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale; Avery Deutsch, a playwright and actor from Katonah, New York; Xiaoyan Kang, a Chinese immigrant playwright working in the United States; Carolyn Kettig, an actor, writer, and artist from New York who often generates work in community; Gloria Majule, a Tanzanian storyteller who writes for and about Africans and the African diaspora; Max Mooney, a queer writer, director, producer, theatre educator, and dramaturg based in Brooklyn; Jordan Ramirez Puckett, a Latine writer from the San Francisco Bay Area; and Dublin- and New York-based writer Rosa Thomas.
MIAMI: YoungArts has announced its 2026 award winners, billed as awards for nation’s most accomplished young visual, literary, and performing artists. Bestowed annually since 1981, the YoungArts Award recognizes young talent across disciplines and aims to affirm their pursuit of a professional life in the arts. A complete list of the 2026 winners is available online.
Winners with distinction for musical theatre are Audrey Chang of Windermere High School (Windermere, Florida), Keilah Clarke of Professional Performing Arts High School (New York City), Chase Klein of Brentwood School (Los Angeles), Mehret Marsh of Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts High School (New York City), Jai’Den Pritchett of Sycamore High School (Montgomery, Ohio), Wendell Remy of Indian River Charter High School (Vero Beach, Florida), Jack Ryan of American Heritage Schools (Plantation, Florida), Cendall Williams of Harrison School for the Arts (Lakeland, Florida), Natalie Winstead of University of North Carolina School of the Arts (Winston-Salem, North Carolina), and Maddox Wood of Webb City High School (Webb City, Missouri).
Other musical theatre honorees include Winter Donnelly of LaGuardia (New York City), Mickey Galman of Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School (Midland, Pennsylvania), Jordan Greenberg of LaGuardia (New York City), Zhymeire Holliday of Northwest School of the Arts (Charlotte, North Carolina), Heather Koike of C.K. McClatchy High School (Sacramento, California), Meg Laskey of Interlochen Arts Academy (Interlochen, Michigan), McKayla Pesaturo of North Broward Preparatory School (Coconut Creek, Florida), Isaiah Phipps, an online/virtual student (McDonough, Georgia), and Ryan Robbins of Walt Whitman High School (Bethesda, Maryland).
Theatre (spoken) winners with distinction are Joshua Prabhakar of Valley Christian High School (San Jose, California), Elijah Primas of Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (Houston), Giselle Register of Douglas Anderson School of the Arts (Jacksonville, Florida), Manav Tokala of Independence High School (Frisco, Texas), Hosannah Wellman of Blue Springs High School (Blue Springs, Missouri). Additional theatre (spoken) honorees are Casey Hilton of Riverdale Country School (Bronx, New York), Kayla Leach of New World School of the Arts High School (Miami), Ava Rivera of Oakwood Secondary School (North Hollywood, California), Layla Rosa of LaGuardia (New York City), and Kaiden Sivills of Bayside High School (Palm Bay, Florida).
NEW YORK CITY: The Dramatists Guild Foundation (DGF) has announced Syracuse Stage as the 2025 recipient of the Lucille Lortel Foundation Indigenous Theatermaker Award for their efforts to showcase the importance of Indigenous storytelling and to help develop a space for Native performers and theatre artists at all levels in their careers. The $20,000 award is presented for work striving to preserve and uplift Indigenous theatremakers in New York or Connecticut.
Syracuse Stage has championed stories from Indigenous communities, such as the 1994 premiere of The Indolent Boys by Pulitzer-winning Kiowa novelist N. Scott Momaday and the 2008 premiere of Tales From the Salt City with Ping Chong, an interview-based examination of Syracuse’s history, including Jeanne Shenandoah, environmental leader of the Onondaga Nation. In 2018, Syracuse Stage launched “Our Words are Seeds,” a collaborative performance project guided by lead artist Ty Defoe. It has evolved into a multi-year, multidisciplinary experience incorporating community-based educational programming, storytelling, and partnerships with Indigenous artists. In summer 2025, Syracuse Stage and Netherlands-based choreographer Nicole Beutler collaborated with Oneida/Haudenosaunee thought leader Michelle Schenandoah on A Room in Our House, a dance piece interrogating the relationship between Dutch colonists and Indigenous peoples of North America.
NEW YORK CITY: Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF), the nonprofit foundation of Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), has announced Charlotte Cohn as this season’s SDCF Denham Fellow for her upcoming production The Sound, opening in May 2025, produced by Center Stage Theatre, a program of the Jewish Community Center of Greater Rochester, New York. The Denham Fellowship is awarded annually to women who are early- and mid-career directors to further develop their skills. The Denham Fellowship comes with a $10,000 award.
Cohn’s musical The Sound is inspired by true events, set in 1943 and today, telling the story of an aging Holocaust survivor who recounts the harrowing days after the deportation of Danish Jews was ordered by the Nazis.
NEW YORK CITY: Emerging playwright Malikah Stafford has been awarded the 2025 Clifford Odets Ensemble Play Commission for her play Dead to Us. Sponsored by the Lee Strasberg Creative Center, the commission supports the development of an original play tailored for college-age actors each fall. The program aims to build on the legacy of the Group Theatre, provide an incubating space for the creation of true ensemble plays in New York City, and cultivate the next generation of collaborating artists.Dead to Us is described as a darkly comic, supernatural ensemble dramedy about a fractured friend group forced to confront the truth about their cruelty, jealousy, and complicity after the death of one of their own. The Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute will present Stafford’s play on Dec. 11-13 at the Irma Sandrey Theatre, directed by Stephanie Rolland with an ensemble cast of NYU Tisch Drama students.
