OSLO, NORWAY: South Korean multidisciplinary theatremaker, composer, and video artist Jaha Koo has been awarded the 2026 International Ibsen Award, the world’s largest international theatre prize awarded biennially in honor of playwright Henrik Ibsen. Koo works at the intersection of theatre, music, video, and technology. Educated in Seoul and Amsterdam, since 2011 he has been based in Ghent, Belgium. His works are presented on stages around the world. According to the jury’s statement, Koo was awarded the International Ibsen Award for “his innovative and deeply human theatre.” Koo will receive the award on Sept. 26 at the National Theatre in Oslo, where he will perform Cuckoo on Sept. 27. Cuckoo takes the audience on a journey through the past 20 years of Korean history, as told by a group of talkative rice cookers.
NEW YORK CITY: Theatre of Young Audiences/USA (TYA/USA), the national service organization connecting, cultivating, and advocating for the field of theatre for young audiences, has announced the recipients of its 2026 National TYA/USA Awards. The awards will be presented in a joint awards ceremony with the Children’s Theatre Foundation of America on May 29 at the Alliance Theatre as part of the 2026 TYA/USA National Festival and Conference, the largest gathering of theatre for young audiences professionals in North America.
Librettist, producer, and New York City Children’s Theater founder and artistic director Barbara Zinn Krieger will receive the Harold Oaks Award for Sustained Excellence in TYA, awarded to individual leaders and companies that have made a significant and lasting impact on the field of TYA. Kennesaw State University Department of Theatre and Performance Studies and Smith-Gilbert Gardens will receive the TYA Community Impact Award for its Smith-Gilbert Gardens Family Theatre, which recognizes community impact through an education program or community engagement initiative related to TYA. Red by Amanda Pintore, Olivia Herneddo, and Jisun Myung, an immersive dance performance for 12- to 36-month-olds and their families, will receive the TYA Artistic Innovation Award, which is given to a single TYA production that has demonstrated innovation and experimentation in content or in form from the current and most recent season.
DALLAS: Undermain Theatre has announced playwright Erin Malone Turner as the 2026 recipient of $10,000 from the Katherine Owens/Undermain Fund for New Work for her ongoing work in the American theatre, with an eye toward a future production of a new play for the Undermain stage. Malone Turner is a Dallas-based theatre artist originally from New Orleans. Her writing has been developed locally with Kitchen Dog Theater (how to catch a ghost), Undermain Theatre (SPACED OUT), Amphibian Stage (through a glass darkly), Bishop Arts Theatre Center (GRAY, ingrained, and PlayingPretend), Echo Theatre (the secret keepers), UT Arlington’s Black Theatre Society (THE BRIDGE), and SheDFW Arts (Hello, Earthlings!). Her TACA Grant-funded commission what fits inside a human heart had its world premiere with Soul Repertory Theatre in October 2023, and was nominated for an Irma P. Hall Black Theatre Award for best play. She has been a member of two DFW-based playwriting cohorts: BATC’s First Move in 2022 and Second Thought’s Thought Process in 2024 and 2026. In 2025, she was Arts Mission Oak Cliff’s Summer Sanctuary Artist-in-Residence, where she presented a staged reading, a poetry community event, and a self-directed workshop performance of for the rest of our lives.
LOS ANGELES: The Echo Theater Company has announced the winners of its 2025 New Play Competition. In first place, with a $1,000 cash prize plus travel and housing to attend rehearsals and a public reading at Atwater Village Theatre, is Alisa Zhulina with Deepfake. It’s set in a near future, when LNM (Lonely No More) sells lifelike companions, and two new lovers, two old flames, and a family collide—testing whether artificial intimacy can heal the very human wounds it exposes. Zhulina’s plays include Algorithm (Blue Ink Playwriting Award finalist, produced by Floor Five Theatre Company as audio drama), Killjoy (Exquisite Corpse Company), Riptide and Sublet (New Perspectives Theatre). Zhulina teaches at NYU Tisch School of the Arts and is the author of Theater of Capital.
Jeremiah OC Jahi won the second place prize of $500 and a rehearsed online reading on March 29 at 4 p.m., for his play Housekeeping, about a tight-knit cleaning crew relocated to a new hotel in a sports entertainment complex bordering all-Black southwest Atlanta and the downtown business district. Jahi is an Atlanta-born, Brooklyn-nurtured Black American playwright currently based in Los Angeles. His reading will be directed by DeJuan Christopher and feature Channel Bell, Ben Cain, Jon Chaffin, Joy DeMichelle, and Matt Elam. A veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, Jahi graduated cum laude from City University of New York, holding majors in Africana studies, theatre, political science, and sociology, and studied creative writing at Fordham University as a part of their writing program for veterans.
Maddie Dennis-Yates is the recipient of the third place award, which comes with a $250 honorarium and a note session with members of the Echo’s artistic staff for Vanessa The Miracle Girl, a spectacle-laden, art historical, gender-bending coming-of-age story. Dennis-Yates holds an MFA from Hunter College. Her work has been commissioned, developed, and/or produced by Fresh Ground Pepper, Workshop Theater, Art House Productions, Stagefemmes at Kenyon College, the Emerging Professional Residents at Milwaukee Repertory Theater, Women’s Weekend Film Challenge, the Source Festival, and others.
CARDIFF, WALES: The finalists of the Annwn Prize 2026, an award for “the best story-driven work made through the use of creative technology from around the world,” have been announced. They will be exhibited at Wales Millenium Center in the U.K. on May 27–June 26. The winner will be selected by an independent panel of industry experts and announced on June 14. Commended for their bold originality, emotional depth and innovative use of technology, the works bridge film, expanded cinema, interactive theatrical installation, and augmented reality. They are:
- NOWISWHENWEARE (the stars) by Andrew Schneider, an interactive theatrical installation where the audience steps into total darkness and becomes the centre of a shifting constellation, through a precisely programmed matrix of nearly 4,000 reactive LED lights and a 496-channel soundscape.
- Constantinopoliad by Sister Sylvester, an expanded cinema work of collective reading in response to the archive of the poet Constantine Cavafy, taking visitors on an epic journey following the teenage Cavafy when he and his family fled Alexandria.
- Colored / Noire by Novaya, which transports visitors to the heart of the Civil Rights struggle in 1950s Alabama, through augmented reality headsets and bone-conduction audio systems.
- Consensus Gentium by Karen Palmer, which transforms audiences into protagonists in a near-future society where freedoms erode under biased AI and surveillance, using facial detection and AI to create a unique, personalized journey.
