Playwrights’ Center is thrilled to announce our 2025-2027 cohort of Jerome and Many Voices Fellows. These artists will be the second group to join us since the terms of these fellowships were expanded to two years, and they’ll be the first to experience the full tenure of their fellowships from the Center’s new home in Saint Paul.
The Jerome Fellowship is supported by the Jerome Foundation, and is awarded to early career playwrights who demonstrate extraordinary potential and artistic vision. Michelle de Joya and Sharifa Yazmeen were part of a robust application pool read by artists nationwide, and were eventually selected by this year’s panel of prominent artists and leaders in the field.
The staff at Playwrights’ Center will be celebrating de Joya’s return following her 2023-2024 stint as our Many Voices Mentee. But while de Joya may be coming back to the Center, she won’t find the Center where she left it.
“I’m excited to be a part of the first cohort in the new building! What an honor! As a Saint Paul girlie myself, the new location motivates me to want to come be in the building more often and immerse myself in not only my own writing but in others’ work. That’s what I’m most excited for: the opportunity to dive into the stories of those who inspire me, and discover more writers and artists who spark creativity in me.”
Yazmeen, a trans Arab-American director, actor, and playwright, is new to the Center and says she’s honored to be joining us. She’ll be developing Fairy Dust: a play about “an imaginative 10-year-old and the reclusive trans woman next door. As they form an unexpected bond, both navigate identity, loneliness, and the power of storytelling.”
Yazmeen also voiced that “…in this moment trans stories are more vital than ever. With trans youth and trans rights under attack, I believe deeply in uplifting narratives that center our resilience, tenderness, and complexity.”
The attacks she references have challenged Playwrights’ Center in recent months. While attempts to silence artists escalate daily, we continue to fulfill our mission by amplifying a broad and inclusive range of voices. In the current environment we are especially proud to continue our Many Voices Fellowships supporting early-career Black playwrights, playwrights of color, and/or Indigenous playwrights. These fellowships are also made possible by the Jerome Foundation.
This year we welcome Vinecia Coleman, Bianca Nkwonta, and J. Isabel Salazar to the Center, and will joyfully support them as they develop their exceptional, necessary work.
Salazar—a Tejana playwright, creative collaborator and photographer—describes theatrical language as “rusty dirt and technicolor skies, witnessing complex women disrupting time, wrestling impossible dreams, and pushing against Latinx memory and experience.” The move to Minnesota will offer her a unique opportunity to “listen to the people of 10,000 lakes, in hopes of developing a project or opportunity to uplift community.”
Coleman, who aims to tell stories that focus on the Black female experience, has been in the Twin Cities for almost eight years and looks forward to connecting with more local theater artists. “The talent in this city is so rich, and I want to continue to invest in this artistic community. This award will give me resources and time to devote energy toward fostering those relationships.”
Nkownta, by contrast, was raised a few miles from Playwrights’ Center (in Eagan, Minnesota) and says: “All of my writing returns to Minnesota, so I’m looking forward to being where my work wants to be, and reconnecting with the place that my characters cling to. I think it is so crucial to keep the art from our communities—and the people who make it—alive and well. Playwrights’ Center does that by providing spaces and platforms for those who are documenting and theatricalizing the world we live in now.”
Producing artistic director Nicole A. Watson adds that she is “beyond excited to welcome this new cohort to the Center. As an artist-service organization we are charged to deeply support each individual playwright, understanding that they build community and bring us all together through their work. Vital new plays come to life when we amplify and support the unique artistic voice of each of our fellows. These playwrights have the skill, curiosity, and dedication to create urgent and necessary theater and we are proud to be in a position to help them do it.”
Following in Michelle de Joya’s footsteps as Playwrights’ Center’s Many Voices Mentee will be Skye Reddy. This mentorship is offered to a Minnesota-based Black playwright, playwright of color, and/or Indigenous playwright just beginning their career, and provides the recipient with writing and development support.
Reddy is excited to learn more about the craft of playwriting, saying: “I often feel as if I don’t know the rules of the discipline well enough to write plays. This feeling is compounded by the fact that so much of my writing is a multilingual blend of English and Bangla which never seems to quite fit the performance traditions of either language. And I’m really excited about the possibility of doing a staged reading with actors. I will be working on expanding a solo piece I had written and performed last year into an evening-length play with a full cast of characters. It’s a weird but deeply personal story about a Bengali-American teenage ghost navigating spirithood, her former life, and her relationship to her mother, told through fictionalized vignettes of real family stories.”
As Playwrights’ Center has offered a life-long artistic home to playwrights, so has Minnesota offered a legacy of stability to us. Bringing artists together to collaborate in this physical space and this worldwide community has generated astonishing art within our walls. We’re eager to help this cohort carry on this legacy.
Sharifa Yazmeen summarizes it best: “This fellowship gives me the support to keep writing stories that insist we are seen and heard.”
About the artists
Vinecia Coleman is a playwright and actor based in Minneapolis/St. Paul, whose artistic aim as a writer is to tell stories that focus on the Black female experience. Her plays have been developed at the Great Plains Theatre Commons Conference, Boise Contemporary Theatre’s BIPOC Playwright Festival, Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Black Swan Lab, id Theater’s Seven Devils Playwrights’ Conference, and others. Her play Christiana Lysistrata had its 2024 premiere at Main Street Players in Miami, FL. As an actor, she has worked at Penumbra Theatre, Pillsbury House Theatre, Jungle Theater, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Portland Playhouse, and more. MFA: University of Idaho
Michelle de Joya is a Saint Paul performer, playwright, and teaching artist excited to be returning to Playwrights’ Center after the ‘23-’24 Many Voices Mentorship. She’s been a part of Exposed Brick Theater’s Emerging Writers Cohort (‘22-’23, ‘24-’25), was a semifinalist for Theater Mu’s Mu Tang Clan Writing Incubator, a two-time semi-finalist for The David Geffen School of Drama at Yale for Playwriting (‘23, ‘25), and has received artistic and monetary support from Minnesota State Arts Board (‘23), Theater Latté Da, Wonderlust Productions, and more.
Bianca Nkwonta (she/her) is a consultant and writer originally from Eagan, Minnesota. She writes stories about the Black and African diaspora, as well as its intersections with Midwestern-ness, womanhood, youth, health, wealth, and the pursuit of happiness. Prior to pursuing theater, she worked as a consultant, and her five years of experience in corporate America has greatly informed her perspectives and her writing. She is one of the fellows in La MaMa’s Experiments in Playwriting Fellowship. MFA: NYU
Skye Reddy is a South Asian writer, filmmaker, and performance artist. They are a Loft Literary Center Mentor Series Fellow (2025-26), a Film Score Fest BIPOC Scholarship recipient (2025), and were a Pillsbury House + Theatre Naked Stages fellow (2024), a member of the St. Paul Neighborhood Network (SPNN) Spotlight Shorts documentary cohort (2024), and the Production Management Fellow at Children’s Theatre Company (2022-23). Skye has previously worked with The Southern Theater, Black Ensemble Productions, Red Eye Theater, MN Opera, Theater Mu, LimeArts, and on various Twin Cities-based short films. They hold a degree in Theater and Dance from Macalester College.
J. Isabel Salazar A Tejana playwright, creative collaborator and photographer. Theatrical language is rusty dirt and technicolor skies, witnessing complex women disrupting time, wrestling impossible dreams, and pushing against Latinx memory and experience. MFA: Writing for Performance, California Institute of the Arts. Residencies: F.A.I.R. Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Eugene O’Neil Theatre Center, The Orchard Project and Hyde Park Theatre. Awards: Kennedy Center A.C.T.F. Latinidad Playwriting Award, Frontera Fest Best of Week and Best of Fest, semi-finalist for the National Playwrights Conference and the Goodman Theatre New Stages Residency. Frequent performer for Harry Gamboa, Jr.
Sharifa Yazmeen is a trans Arab-American director, actor, and playwright. She has completed directing fellowships with The Drama League, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Manhattan Theatre Club, Geva Theatre, and was a Eugene O’Neill national directing fellow. Yazmeen’s plays have been published in Overheard, a collection of monologues by and for TNB2S+ artists, and both editions of the Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays. Her play Close to Home was distinguished by the American Theatre Wing at the annual Antoinette Gala, and was included on the 2023 Kilroy’s list. Yazmeen holds an MFA in Directing from Brown/Trinity Rep.