BUFFALO, N.Y.: The Alleyway Theatre has named Karissa Murrell Myers the recipient of the 2024 Mazumdar New Play Award. Myers’s award-winning play Black Bear Island will be produced by the Alleyway in their 2024-25 season.
A panel of 80 theatre artists determined 22 Mazumdar Award semifinalists over the course of a year. The Alleyway artistic team then selected Myers’s play in addition to finalists The Lost Women by Nubia Monks; Six Men Dressed Like Joseph Stalin by Dianne Nora; and Wife of Headless Man Investigates Her Own Disappearance by Yussef El Guindi.
Black Bear Island, a 2024 National Playwrights Conference finalist and Blue Ink Award semifinalist, follows a woman who returns to her hometown in the Pacific Northwest after the mysterious death of her estranged childhood sweetheart. The Alleyway’s production of Black Bear Island will be produced in February 2025, directed by Daniel F. Lendzian.
Mazumdar is a Chicago-based playwright, actor, producer, and casting director and is the co-founding artistic director of Bramble Theatre Company.
The Mazumdar New Play Award has been presented annually since 1989 in memory of Canadian actor and playwright Maxim Mazumdar.
NEW HAVEN, CONN.: Keegon Schuett has been awarded this year’s Yale Drama Series Prize for their play this dry spell. This year’s winning play was chosen by playwright Jeremy O. Harris from over 2,000 submissions.
Schuett will receive the $10,000 cash award of the David Charles Horn Prize at a ceremony in October, where the Yale Schwarzman Center and Long Wharf Theatre will hold a staged reading of this dry spell. The play will then be published by Yale University Press.
“Keegon’s this dry spell is an imaginative portrayal of alienation, isolation, conflicted love, metamorphosis, hope, and beauty,” Francine Horn, the director of the David Charles Horn Foundation, said in a statement. “It is an uplifting, poetic piece that merited the Yale Drama Series Prize.”
Schuett is a playwright, filmmaker, and performance artist from Tennessee who holds an MFA from Northwestern University. They have had multiple plays for young audiences published by YouthPLAYS.
The Yale Drama Series Prize is administered by Yale University Press and the David Charles Horn Foundation.
NEW YORK CITY: The Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF) has announced the inaugural Abe Burrows Award for Assistant Directors. The first awardees are Violeta Picayo and Sharifa Essa Yasmin.
The new award for early-career directors comes with an unrestricted comes with an unrestricted cash award of $10,000. The awarded assistant directors must assist on work by a Stage Directors and Choreographers Society member between June 2024 and December 2024.
The award is named for the late director and writer Abe Burrows, a Tony and Pulitzer Prize awardee.
Picayo is a director, choreographer, and actor whose directing credits include La MaMa, the Public Theater, American Repertory Theater, Portland Center Stage, and multiple international venues. She is a company member of the SuperGeographics and an associate artist with SITI Company.
Yasmin is a director, actor, and playwright who was previously a national directing fellow with the O’Neill Theater Center. She was the inaugural recipient of the SDCF Barbara Whitman Award in 2021 and her play Close to Home was named to the 2023 Kilroys List. Yasmin holds an MFA from Brown University/Trinity Rep.
CHICAGO: The Joyce Foundation has announced the recipients of the 20th annual Joyce Awards. The awards support artists of color throughout the Great Lakes region in the creation of new works.
The artist-organization pairs will receive a $100,000 commission, with at least $30,000 serving as an artist stipend.
This year’s awardees include Andrea Assaf and the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Mich. with the multimedia theatre production DRONE; musician and composer Marcus Elliott and the Detroit Parks Coalition; playwright and teaching artist Terry Guest and the Chicago Children’s Theatre with the musical Milo Imagines the World, based on the book by Matt de la Peña and illustrator Christian Robinson; playwright Katie Ka Vang and Saint Paul’s Theater Mu with the theatre project Hmong Futures; and artist Edra Soto with the Sculpture Center in Cleveland.
The 2024 Joyce Awards were determined by a panel of arts professionals, including past winners.
