NEW YORK CITY: Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF) has announced Cincinnati Playhouse associate artistic director, teacher, arts leader, and director of theatre and opera Joanie Schultz as the recipient of the 2025 Zelda Fichandler Award. Schultz will receive an unrestricted award of $5,000 from SDCF and will be recognized in a celebration at Steppenwolf Theatre on April 6, along with the three finalists: Dr. Brian Cheslik, artistic director of Deaf Austin Theatre, ASL interpreter, and University of Texas ASL professor; Maija García, a choreographer, director, and Guthrie Theater‘s director of education and professional training; and Addie Gorlan-Han, a director, educator, and associate producer with Guthrie Theater. All finalists were from the U.S.’s central region. Named for Arena Stage founding artistic director Zelda Fichandler, this award recognizes directors and choreographers who have demonstrated accomplishment, creativity, and investment in a particular community or region. It focuses on a different region each year.

NEW YORK CITY: Perelman Performing Arts Center and Civis Foundation have announced the nine artistic commissions for the second year of The Democracy Cycle, a program that invites artists to explore the nature, practice, and experience of democracy in new live performance works. Theatre artists chosen are Andrea Ambam (Twelve Angry Black Women), Holly Bass (Civilities, or How to Secede Without Really Trying), Daniel Leeman Smith and Blossom Johnson (Proclamation to the Great White Father and All His People), and Nathan Yungerberg (Barry, The 1970s Black Comedy Spinoff That Never Happened). They will each receive a $30,000 commission and another $30,000 for project development, totaling $60,000. This multi-year program is committed to 25 commissions across theatre, opera, dance, music, and multidisciplinary practices. Submissions for its next open call will open Feb. 9. 

MIAMI: The Oscar Cintas Foundation presented its fellowship awards on Jan. 22 to five distinguished creators of Cuban heritage for their contributions in architecture and design, creative writing, music composition, photography, and visual arts. Recipients were each presented a $25,000 award to create a proposed project. The ceremony at the University of Miami was hosted by film critic and writer Alejandro Ríos. Theatre artists honored included director, dramatic advisor, author, playwright, and adapter Agnieska Hernández Díaz (La perfecta simetría, Strip Tease) and actor, director, and playwright Carmen Pelaez (Rum and Coke, an adaptation of Antigone commissioned by Huntington Theatre and Miami New Drama).

NEW YORK CITY: The National Theatre Conference, held in its centennial anniversary year on Jan. 16-18 in New York City, announced the recipients of its conference awards. Its Person of the Year was downtown theatre legend Mark Russell, former artistic director of P.S. 122 and Under the Radar Festival founder. The Stavis Playwright Award, recognizing an outstanding emerging playwright, was given to Novid Parsi for The Life You Gave Me, a domestic drama about a son who struggles to save his mother from a violent marriage, and about how Parsi himself navigates cultural and professional expectations. It premiered at Boise Contemporary Theater in April 2025. Washington, D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company was awarded best theatre. Mekala Sridhar, a former Woolly associate producer and current associate producer at Solas Nua, was awarded as best emerging professional for her work as a dramaturg, director, and producer. The Paul Green Award was given to performer and director Nile Harris. This award recognizes and encourages excellent theatre artists ​​under the age of 30, and is selected by the NTC Person of the Year.

NEW YORK CITY: The ASCAP Foundation has announced the recipients of its 2025 scholarships and awards, with several musical theatre writers as winners. The Richard Rodgers New Horizons award funded by the late Mary Rodgers’s estate went to Maybe Happy Ending writers Hue Park and Will Aronson. The Stephen Schwartz Musical Theatre Teacher of the Year award, which honors middle and high school theatre teachers who produce musicals, was given to Dr. Lamar Bagley. Ari Afsar was the musical theatre recipient of the Harold Adamson Lyric Award. Collaborators Selda Sahin and Derek Gregor won awards given to writers who participated in ASCAP’s Musical Theatre Workshops; for Sahin, the Cole Porter Award, and for Gregor, the Harold Arlen Musical Theatre Writing Award. Singer-songwriter Eleri Ward, known for her indie-folk Sondheim covers, won the Peggy Lee Songwriter Award for her original song “There It Goes.”

Scholarship winners included Nia Alsop, the musical theatre recipient of the Fran Morganstern Davis scholarship, given to a full-time undergraduate music student at Manhattan School of Music; Tyler Kinnaman, recipient of the Max Deryfuss scholarship given to a composition student at NYU Tisch; Al Hiciano de Góngora, recipient of the Frederick Loewe scholarship given to a musical theatre composition student at NYU Tisch; Perry Zoe, recipient of the Ira Gershwin scholarship given to a LaGuardia School of the Arts junior; and Miu Sato, a recipient of a Music Is Our Foundation scholarship open to students actively studying music. The Jerry Herman Broadway Legacy Prize that honors students selected from master classes in ASCAP touring cities went to Mason Farmer and Elise Anderson. All recipients can be found in the foundation’s digital scrapbook.

NEW YORK CITY: The Dramatists Guild has announced its 2026 National Fellows. The musical theatre fellows are Georgina Escobar, based in El Paso, Texas; Jennine “DOC” Krueger, based in Atlanta; Jessi Pitts, based in Seattle; and Laura Schein and Ben Zeadman, both based in Los Angeles. The playwriting fellows are Kari Barclay, based in Cleveland; Thelma Virata de Castro, based in San Diego, California; Gretchen Suárez-Peña, based in Boca Raton, Florida; and Lolita Stewart-White, based in Miami. The National Fellows Program is an expansion of DGF’s historic Fellows program serving writers across the United States. This cohort of emerging dramatists will work under the guidance and leadership of professional playwrights and musical theatre dramatists to develop work in pursuit of adding to the canon of regionally-produced and developed work. The chairs of the National Fellows curriculum are Christine Toy Johnson and Bernardo Cubría.

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.: Wagner College’s theatre program has announced James Still as the winner of the 2026 Stanley Drama Award for Haunt Me. The play blends fiction and reality in a surreal, compassionate exploration of identity, memory, and creation about a bestselling horror writer who begins to vanish into the very novel she’s writing, aided—and increasingly manipulated—by an ambitious AI assistant named MUSE. The first runner-up is Netta & Ry by Lisa Langford, and the second runner-up is The Henry Clyde Canning Murder by Christian Missonak. The award ceremony will take place at The Players in New York City on Feb. 28, with a presentation of a short scene from the winning play, directed by professor Mickey Tennenbaum and performed by members of the Wagner College Theatre community.

UNION, N.J.: Premiere Stages has named the Kean University students and alumnus who have won 2026 Bauer Boucher Playwriting Awards. Four student playwrights received $500 awards: Goodness Kehinde (class of ‘26), Samantha Pugliese (class of ‘26), Layla Welsh (class of ‘28), and Alexandra Wuethrich (class of ‘26). Alumnus Sahirah Z. Johnson (class of ‘17) won the Alumni Playwriting Award, which comes with a $1,000 cash prize. These awards are named for W. John Bauer and Nancy Boucher, and support Kean University writers with visibility, dramaturgical feedback, a cash award, and the opportunity to hear their play read by professional actors. Their plays are directed by John J. Wooten, producing artistic director of Premiere Stages.