NEW YORK CITY: Clubbed Thumb has named the recipients of its Biennial Commission. Playwrights Angela Hanks and Gabrielle Reisman will split the top prize of $15,000. The winners will receive two years of developmental support for their works. Finalists Gracie Gardner, Daniel Glenn, and Paul Cameron Hardy will each receive a cash prize of $1,000, and an opportunity to workshop their plays.

This year’s prompt was to consider the work of Caryl Churchill, and Clubbed Thumb received 245 blind proposals. In addition to the theatre’s staff, the selection panel included Clare Barron, Phillip Howze, Mia Katigbak, and Alex Borinsky.

Hanks is a Brooklyn-based playwright whose works include Good Latimer, Devil Music, breathe into this bag, Myrna in Transit, Big Tex, and Heloise Sails the Boat. Her plays have been produced and/or developed at Clubbed Thumb, Ensemble Studio Theatre, New Georges, the Flea Theater, New York International Fringe Festival, Chicago’s Stockyards Theater Project, and the Big Funk Company in Paris, France. She is an alumna of Obie Award- winning Youngblood, a MacDowell Colony Fellow, an alumna of Clubbed Thumb’s Early Career Writer’s Group, a Lincoln Center Director’s Lab member, and a New Georges Affiliated Artist. A recipient of a NYSCA grant, she is currently at work on Wilder, a Clubbed Thumb commission. She received an MFA in Playwriting from the New School for Drama.

Reisman is a playwright and director based in New York and New Orleans. She is a founding member of Underbelly and director of Brooklyn Yard. She has developed her works with Clubbed Thumb/Playwrights Horizons SuperLab, Page 73, Sundance Theatre Lab, Ingram New Works Lab, Vortex Rep, the MacDowell Colony, the Orchard Project, the NOLA Project, among others. Upcoming productions include Jeune Terre, an EST/Sloan and New Plays at Barnard commission premiering in March, and Flood City with D.C.’s Theater Alliance in May. She is a Core Writer at the Playwrights Center, an affiliated artist with New Georges, and a former NNPN Playwright in Residence. Reisman holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin.

Established in 2005, the Clubbed Thumb Biennial Commission had been awarded to seven playwrights.