NEW YORK CITY: The Guggenheim Foundation has awarded fellowships this year to 223 American and Canadian scientists, scholars, writers, and artists, selected from nearly 5,000 applicants. The theatre fellows are performance artist Penny Arcade, librettist-playwright Stephanie Fleischmann, playwright Haruna Lee, UCLA scholar Sean Metzger, Ma-Yi Theater Company founding artistic director Ralph B. Peña, playwright Alva Rogers, playwright Elaine Romero, and Boston University College of Fine Arts dean Harvey Young.
Since its establishment in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has granted nearly $450 million in fellowships to over 19,000 individuals, including more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, and winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors.
NEW YORK CITY: Playwrights Horizons has inaugurated its stewardship of the Weissberger/Harris Award, granting $15,000 to one playwright and $2,500 to two finalists for unpublished and unproduced full-length plays. This year’s winner is filmmaker and playwright Dylan Guerra for Signaling. Finalists are Audley Puglisi (a NYSCA/NYFA fellow and Playwrights Realm Writing Fellow) for Bridge Play; and Eliana Theologides Rodriguez for Marble Rooftop (she makes her Off-Broadway debut later this month with Indian Princesses at Atlantic Theater Company, a co-production with Rattlestick Theater). The award was announced at the Playwrights Horizons gala on April 13 in the Ziegfeld Ballroom.
Dylan Guerra is a Brooklyn-based queer Colombian writer-director originally from Miami. As a playwright, he is the recipient of Playwrights Horizons’ Weingarten Commission and an MTC/Sloan Commission. He was shortlisted for the Brentwood Prize and is a previous Weissberger finalist. He has been a member of Ars Nova’s Play Group (where his solo show Find Him was produced), Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Youngblood, and Page 73 Productions’ Interstate 73. Signaling was presented at the American Museum of Natural History and developed at Manhattan Theatre Club. His play The Grief Eater Near North Bender will play New York Theatre Workshop in the upcoming 2026-27 season.
The Anna L. Weissberger Foundation has presented this award for playwriting excellence for 25 years, including to plays that have gone on to be produced by Playwrights Horizons. This is the first year that Playwrights Horizons has administered the award, in which role the company will solicit by-invitation-only nominations every fall.
NEW YORK CITY: Repertorio Español has named BT Hayes and Geo Rivera as the 2026-27 New York Community Trust Van Lier Directing Fellows, a program designed to support emerging Latine directors in New York City. The fellowship will provide them mentorship, guidance, and a professional platform to mount a full production. Hayes and Rivera will direct contemporary works. The 2027 cycle will be dedicated to staging classical plays from the Spanish Golden Age.
BT Hayes is an artist from Pittsburgh and Richmond, Virginia, now based in New York City. As a playwright, Hayes participated in the 24 Hour Plays: Nationals (2024) and the Moxie 2025 Incubator with 500 Rats: A Love Story. Their Princeton senior thesis, an adaptation and translation of Schiller’s Mary Stuart, received the Robert and Lynn Fagles Translation Award.
Geo Rivera is a queer first-generation Honduran/Salvadoran American multidisciplinary artist based in New York City, and is the founder of Geo Rivera Productions, which works across producing, directing, acting, singing, and playwriting. Rooted in lived experience, Rivera’s work centers on the belief that existence itself is a political act and that art is a powerful tool for collective change.
NEW YORK CITY: The Lucille Lortel Theatre has announced five new musicals that will receive up to $10,000 of tailored support through the 121 Project, a development initiative in its second year. The 2026 recipients are Bandit Queen, with book and lyrics by Sami Horneff and book and music by Amanda D’Archangelis; Francois & The Rebels: A Punk Rock Ritual, with book, music, and lyrics by Jaime Cepero; Fusong, with book and lyrics by Christine Toy Johnson, music by Cecilia Lin, based on The Lost Daughter of Happiness by Geling Yan, and conceived and directed by Gabriel Barre; Next Year in Connecticut!, with book and lyrics by Sarah Rossman and music by Sequoia Sellinger; and Out There, a trio’s co-creation with book by Isaac Gómez, music and lyrics by Michelle J. Rodriguez, and direction and choreography by William Carlos Angulo. These musicals were selected from 121 submissions.
OAKLAND, CALIF.: The Kenneth Rainin Foundation has announced Danny Duncan as the 2026 theatre recipient of the Rainin Arts Fellowship, an annual program administered by United States Artists that honors Bay Area artists working in dance, film, public space, and theatre. The fellowship awards four artists with unrestricted grants of $100,000 and access to tailored resources, such as financial planning, marketing support, and legal services.
Duncan is a director, choreographer, playwright, composer, and educator from San Francisco’s Fillmore District. His multidisciplinary practice spans musical theatre, dance, and community-based performance, often drawing from Black history and cultural traditions. At age 17, Duncan founded the Duncan Company of Performing Artists, where he choreographed and danced in two ballets, Ballet Afro Haiti and Ballet Black, that toured the West Coast for seven years. Throughout his six-decade career, he has written, composed, and directed numerous productions, including the musicals Uhuruh, Billie’s Song, and Go Down Garvey. As a teaching artist and youth theatre director, Duncan has dedicated the last 30 years of his career to ensuring the next generation of artists has a place to grow in the Bay Area.
DANVILLE, CALIF.: The five 2026 fellows for the Eugene O’Neill Foundation’s Travis Bogard Artist in Residence program at Tao House have been announced. The residency supports playwrights and theatremakers developing new work in alignment with Eugene O’Neill’s legacy of innovation in the American theatre. Bill Bowers, an accomplished mime, returns to Tao House to work on his memoir, which he began in his 2021 residency. Maria Gallego is a professor at Universidad Loyola who is researching connections between O’Neill plays written during the Harlem Renaissance and the techniques, drama, and concerns of Black femme writers through the work of contemporaries Zora Neale Hurston and Georgia Douglas Johnson. Phillip Smith, an acting professor at Pace University, is writing about a play about an elderly father and his middle-aged son and daughter, using intersecting timelines. Charles II plans to work on a play titled The Irresistibles, which follows two college roommates—one of whom is Black, the other white—who test a homemade time machine, hurling them into racially charged and culture-defining eras of the past. J. Chris Westgate, an O’Neill scholar, will examine the significance of shipwrecks in O’Neill’s early plays and connect them with a “long tradition of shipwreck literature” including Homer’s The Odyssey, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and James Cameron’s Titanic.
NEW YORK CITY: In Scena! Italian Theater Festival NY, New York City’s premiere festival of Italian theatre in all five boroughs, has announced Via Crucis by Marco Di Stefano as the winner of its 2026 In Scena! Playwright Award (formally the Mario Fratti Award). Via Crucis was translated by Caterina Nonis. Finalists include Ninive by Chiara Arrigoni and Nostra Signora Dell’Acqua by Deanna Morlupi. Di Stefano was also awarded the 2017 Mario Fratti Award with Chiara Boscaro for The City Rises. Via Crucis will receive a reading as part of the festival’s closing ceremony on Tuesday, May 19 at 6 p.m. at the Italian Cultural Institute of New York. Admission to the awards ceremony and reading is free.
Via Crucis is a solo show in 14 free-verse scenes about a 30-year-old man arrested for drug possession and subjected to fatal torture and violence by the police. The play unfolds over the course of a single day, from 5 a.m. until midnight. It’s inspired by the stories of Italian young people who’ve died while in custody (Federico Aldrovandi, Giuseppe Uva, and Stefano Cucchi) and young people killed by law enforcement.
NEW YORK CITY: Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF), the nonprofit foundation of Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), has announced director JoAnne Akalaitis as the 2025 Gordon Davidson Award recipient. Named in honor of the founding artistic director of Los Angeles’s Center Theatre Group Gordon Davidson, a visionary leader of the resident theatre movement, the award recognizes a director or choreographer for lifetime achievement and distinguished service in the national nonprofit theatre. The award will be presented to Akalaitis at a ceremony at La MaMa on May 20 at 5:30 p.m.
Akalaitis is a theatre director, writer, and founding member of Mabou Mines with Lee Breuer, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, and David Warrilow. She has been awarded six Obies for direction and sustained achievement. She is the former artistic director of the Public Theater, was a Pew Charitable Trusts artist-in-residence at Court Theatre, and served as a Rockefeller Foundation playwright-in-residence at the Mark Taper Forum in 1984-85 under Davidson’s leadership. There, she developed and directed her play Green Card about immigration, for which she won a Drama-Logue Award. The play ran in New York as part of the New York Festival of the Arts.
NEW YORK CITY: SDCF has announced that Julia Rosa Sosa Chaparro has been chosen to receive the 2026 Barbara Whitman Award, which comes with an unrestricted prize of $10,000. Susanna Jaramillo, Irvin Mason Jr., Sarah Shin, and Diana Wyenn are the four finalists, who will each receive a $1,000 unrestricted award. Established by theatrical producer Barbara Whitman in 2021, this award recognizes a director who has developed a clear and distinctive artistic voice and demonstrated unique vision.
Julia Rosa Sosa Chaparro is a director, playwright, and songwriter from Ciudad Juárez, focused on projects that uplift immigrant and BIPOC communities. Recent directing credits include A Christmas in Ochape at New Native Theatre, Life Is a Dream at the University of Oklahoma, and The Heart Sellers at Dobama Theatre. Her play El Toro y la Niña was adapted into a radio play for ReUnion rEvolución: A Latinx New Works Festival.
NEW YORK CITY: Irish Repertory Theatre has announced that it has expanded its collaboration with Dublin’s Fishamble: The New Play Company for the Transatlantic Commissions Program in 2026-27, in association with Harlem’s Apollo Theater. Launched in 2022, the Transatlantic Commissions Program supports and fosters diverse voices in Irish theatre by commissioning Black Irish writers and artists of color to develop new work. The 2026-27 cohort is composed of Tishé Fatunbi, Dafe Orugbo, Esosa Ighodaro, and Seán Gallen.
The selected writers are commissioned to develop new full-length plays over the course of the program, under the mentorship of playwright, producer, and Apollo director of new works Kelley Girod, with dramaturgical support by Fishamble literary manager Gavin Kostick and Irish Rep director of new play development Nicole Murphy Dubey. The program began in April 2026 and will culminate in public staged readings in Dublin and New York in spring and summer 2027.
