Playwrights’ Center is pleased to announce that in continued partnership with Venturous Theater Fund we will welcome four distinctively extraordinary new fellows to join us for a 2025-27 term.
The Venturous Playwright Fellowships are awarded through a combination of nomination and application. An invited group of nominators generates a list of venturous plays that we share with producing theaters of all sizes across the country. Interested theaters and nominated playwrights form partnerships to apply for the fellowship, the recipients of which are selected by a panel of theater industry leaders. These partner theaters commit to producing the world premieres of plays that might not otherwise find production support, and this fellowship financially undergirds these commitments from those theaters.
The bold and adventurous plays that captured our nominators and selection panel this year are a “tender and meditative afro-futurist fantasia,” an “epic Indigenous post-apocalyptic zombie play,” an “investigation of the rippling effects of sexual trauma, memory, disability and violence’s reach through time” and a play set “in a fantastical fairy-tale world” where “two Korean American sisters are deemed too fat to fit in their family grave.”
The playwrights are: Nissy Aya (partnered with HERE Arts Center), Madeline Easley (partnered with Soho Rep), Gethsemane Herron (partnered with WP Theater and the Apollo Theater), and Seayoung Yim (partnered with Theatre Battery).
Venturous Theater Fund, a fund of Tides Foundation, supports ambitious new work for the stage and the artists who create it. Our partnership with Venturous helps us say “yes” to challenging work that others often find too daunting to support.
Nissy Aya says that prunin, hoein n cuttin grapes “has been in development for years, touched by the talents of many, becoming a site of communion. And in collaborating with HERE, I get to do all of that in my HOMETOWN (#TheBronxAllDay) in a venue known for breaking forms and shaping the impossible.”
HERE’s co-directors (Jesse Cameron Alick, Annalisa Dias, Lanxing Fu, and Lauren Miller) “couldn’t be more thrilled to realize this vision together with Nissy.” They celebrate that “Nissy writes a world into existence that is explicitly and expansively queer, that bends space-time, that unearths forms of relating beyond colonial capitalist structures.”
Madeline Easley expressed appreciation to be receiving support as a Native American playwright in an uncertain historical moment. “During this fellowship, I will interrogate the ending of my play, Feast for the Dead, with Soho Rep to understand how the theatrical revival of an ancient mourning practice may renew the sacred dialogue between the living and the dead. All of my plays ask similar questions: what do we owe the dead, and therefore, what can we promise the living?”
Directors Cynthia Flowers, Caleb Hammons, Eric Ting of Soho Rep are “honored to begin this journey with Maddie and her remarkable play.” Eric Ting elaborates, “Feast for the Dead wrestles with big ideas: of accountability and resilience, of the consequence of trauma, of cycles of destruction and rebirth—and wraps it all in the unexpected vessel of a zombie apocalypse. With a keen sense of pop culture, a vibrant flair for the theatrical, and a full beating aching heart, Maddie dispels the illusions we create to hide the fact that we are being eaten.”
Gethsemane Herron returns again to the Center after stints as a 2021-22 Jerome Fellow, 2022-23 Many Voices Fellow, and 2023-24 McKnight Fellow in Playwriting.
As playwrights make lives in the arts, it is rare to find consistent support. But consistency is often what’s needed to help singular writers like Gethsemane sustain and realize their vision throughout their careers. She is feeling the effects of that support from Playwrights’ Center as her play KIN takes its next step onto a hallowed, historic stage.
The Apollo and WP Theaters, who will partner to produce KIN , say that they “look forward to our companies jointly cultivating the work of an extraordinary Black woman playwright.”
Gethsemane won’t enter this stage of her career alone. “This fellowship will allow me to fulfill my long-held dream—making my off-Broadway debut! But it’s more than that—it’s who I get to make my debut with. I get to make it with Kelley Nicole Girod, Kamilah Forbes, Lisa McNulty. I get to make it with one of my dearest friends and long-time collaborator, Katherine Wilkinson. I get to work with the Apollo Theater, an eminent part of Black history.”
In a statement from both theaters, they highlight that “For the past 90 years, the Apollo has provided a space where Black creative excellence meets activism. WP Theater has elevated the work of Women+ artists at every stage of their careers for the last 47 years.”
Theatre Battery focuses on making theater accessible with “Radical Hospitality: No Cost Admission for All Audiences” and runs an annual summer program that occupies vacant retail and warehouse locations, converting found spaces into performing arts installations.
Seayoung has worked with Theatre Battery for a decade and can’t wait to bring Jar of Fat to “the community of Kent, WA which has a significant BIPOC population.” She continues that it “feels like a wonderful homecoming because the Seattle area is where I grew up as a human and as a playwright. I’m also obsessed with malls, and if you don’t already know, it is the Kent Station Mall that houses the mighty Theatre Battery.”
Logan Ellis, Theatre Battery’s Producing Artistic Director, calls Jar of Fat “an unforgettable theatrical experience” and is “completely floored that our team at Theatre Battery has been given the opportunity to produce the world premiere of the play. Seayoung writes her characters with total compassion and builds around them a world rich in theatrical metaphor, sadistically fun humor, puppetry, and a delicious aftertaste of camp.”
Playwrights’ Center’s Associate Artistic Director Pirronne Yousefzadeh “couldn’t be more thrilled” to welcome these writers, and says that “each is brave and unflinching in their grapplings with some of the most challenging aspects of our shared humanity and the cruelties of our world. Yet at the same time, they offer hope through their theatrical innovation, humor, and buoyancy. I am ecstatic that I will get to know these extraordinary artists better and I look forward to supporting them and their invaluable contributions to our field. Thanks to them, the future remains bright.”
Our four new fellows will receive a $25,000-per-year playwright stipend, plus an annual healthcare allowance of $5,000 (for a total of $60,000 of direct support to each fellow), over $15,000 per year in development and holistic artist support, and travel/housing to engage with the work of other artists and connect with theater professionals.
Partner theaters are eligible for a production subsidy of up to $75,000 to support the theaters’ productions of the Venturous plays, and are promoted by Playwrights’ Center to theaters and audiences across the country.
In addition, three runners-up will also receive $10,000 in recognition of their work: Andrea Assaf (DRONE), Roger Q. Mason (Night Cities: A Bayard Rustin Ritual), and Jaymes Sanchez (A Plausible History of Xicotencatl II).
Along with the announcement of fellowship recipients, the Center shares the list of nominated plays—“the Playwrights’ Center Venturous List”—to encourage the theater community to join us in supporting challenging and adventurous theatrical work. This list can be found here.
Producing Artistic Director Nicole A. Watson spoke to the ongoing and increasing importance of offering these fellowships and celebrating these artists. “It is in moments like this where one can have a sense of abundance. Expanding the fellowship to four fellows and three runners-up is meaningful at a time when arts and artists are being attacked and defunded. Playwrights’ Center is honored to build on our partnership with the Venturous Theater Fund, support these incredible artists, and when the time comes, celebrate their productions.”
This year, a common theme among incoming fellows across Playwrights’ Center’s programs has been their joy in the gift of collaboration.
Nissy is “most excited about the opportunity to finally have prunin, hoein n cuttin grapes fully realized, to dream out loud with collaborators, and practice a form of theater that is Black queer freedom-making in praxis.” Gethsemane is thrilled she’ll “get to work with a team of women I love, respect, feel so safe with.” To Seayoung, the fellowship means “artistic freedom that’s resourced and supported and provides a way to build and deepen new and existing artistic collaborations.”
And Maddie concludes, “It is a gift and a lifeline to write within this fellowship’s community, knowing that I will be held through this uncertain period in the arts.”
About the Venturous Playwright Fellows & partner theaters
prunin, hoein n cuttin grapes
By Nissy Aya
In partnership with HERE Arts Center
About the play
In the highly regimented , we witness the lives and lessons of a community of femmes assigned to teach the tools of sexual intimacy and pleasure to others. Led by Alpha and her right-hand, her beta, Bilinda, this proud community of hoes carries on just them and their chil’ren. But with the pressures of a Choosing looming, the community deals with an unexpected and daunting assignment.
About the playwright
Nissy Aya (nissy; she/ze/we) is a Black femme from the Bronx. She and all her younger selves tell stories and tall tales — while helping others to do the same. As a cultural worker and writer, we believe in the transformative nature of storytelling, rehearsing revolution (quiet, world-ending, and otherwise), and examining how we move forward/shape new worlds through healing justice, Afrofuturist frameworks, and tenderness/intimacy/ practices of feeling good. Zir creative work reflects those notions while exploring the lines between oral history, archives and memory, detailing both the absence and presence of love, and giving all the life (and then some) to queer Black Femmes. Nissy’s work has been supported and/or developed with Breaking the Binary, SPACE on Ryder Farm, New York Stage and Film, Hermitage Artist Retreat, and Lambda Literary to name a few. Nissy is a 2023 recipient of the Dramatist Guild’s Lanford Wilson Award. former member of The Public’s Emerging Writers Group, former New York Theatre Workshop 2050 Artistic Fellow, and a finalist for the Hermitage Major Theatre Award.
About HERE Arts Center
Since 1993, HERE Arts Center has been one of New York’s most prolific arts organizations. Today, it stands at the forefront of the city’s cultural scene, producing and presenting daring, new, multidisciplinary performance experiences. From our home in Lower Manhattan, HERE builds an inclusive community that nurtures artists of all backgrounds as they disrupt conventional expectations to create innovative performances in theatre, dance, music, puppetry, media, and visual art. By providing these genre-blending artists with an adaptive, flexible home for developing and producing their work, we share a range of perspectives reflective of the complexity of our city. HERE welcomes curious audiences to witness groundbreaking performances, responsive to the world in which we live, at free and affordable prices. For more information, visit www.here.org.
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Feast for the Dead
By Madeline Easley
In partnership with Soho Rep
About the play
After the fall of the Indian Child Welfare Act in the days leading up to the zombie apocalypse, Kay was adopted out of her Tribe by a wealthy family who then abandoned her when they escaped the carnage by sea. Seven years later, Kay is a thriving citizen of a Confederacy of Tribes who took over governance of Turtle Island after the settler government fell. Just as suddenly as they appeared, the zombies disintegrate, and the one percent return from sea, ready to re-colonize. The only solution? Revive the centuries-old Huron-Wendat tradition of holding a Feast of the Dead.
About the playwright
Madeline (Maddie) Easley is an NYC-based, Wyandotte playwright. Her work tells epic, speculative stories to provide a framework for living in decolonial futures. Madeline’s work has been presented at the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program (YIPAP), La Jolla Playhouse, Kansas City Repertory Theater (KCREP), Native Voices at the Autry, the American Indian Community House (AICH), REACH at the Kennedy Center, the TCL Chinese Theatre, and more. She is a 2025 First Peoples Performing Arts Fellow, a 2025 New Harmony Project Writer-In-Residence, a 2025 American Indian Community House – Governor’s Island Artist-in-Residence, the Inaugural 2023 Four Directions Playwright, a 2022 Greenhouse Resident at SPACE on Ryder Farm, a 2022 LA SKINS FEST featured filmmaker, and a 2021 First Peoples Fund Cultural Capital Fellow. Born in Kansas City, Madeline is a proud citizen of the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma. Represented by Chris Till – Paradigm Talent Agency. Website: maddieeasley.com
About Soho Rep
Soho Rep provides meaningful opportunities for radical theater makers at critical junctures in their artistic practice through our productions, the Writer Director Lab, and our Studio workshops and commissions. We also prioritize living wages for artists and provide artists with staff positions through Project Number One.
Plays that have premiered at Soho Rep and gone on to future productions include: Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon, Hansol Jung’s Wolf Play (5 Lortel Awards including Outstanding Play), Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview (Pulitzer Prize in Drama), and Misha Chowdhury’s Public Obscenities (Pulitzer Prize Finalist). Most recently, 13 artists received Obie Awards for their work on Raja Feather Kelly’s The Fires and Becca Blackwell and Amanda Duarte’s Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month; and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Carmelita Tropicana’s Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! was named one of New York Magazine’s Best Productions of 2024. For more info, visit sohorep.org.
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KIN
By Gethsemane Herron
In partnership with WP Theater and The Apollo
About the play
As a family celebrates the return of their imprisoned son, father, and partner, GHC reveals her worst secret via the internet. Years later, GHC considers that action as her body falls ill in violence’s aftermath. KIN is an investigation of the rippling effects of sexual trauma, memory, disability and violence’s reach through time.
About the playwright
Gethsemane Herron is a poet-playwright from Washington, D.C. She has developed work with Ars Nova, The Fire This Time Festival, The Liberation Theater Company, Playwrights’ Center, Roundabout Theatre Company, Mosaic Theater Company, Classical Theater of Harlem, True Colors Theater Company, Woolly Mammoth Theater Company, and WP Theater, amongst others. She was a ‘20-‘22 member of Ars Nova’s Play Group, a ‘20-‘22 member of the WP Lab, and a ‘21-‘22 Jerome Fellow/‘22-‘23 Many Voices Fellow/‘23-‘24 McKnight Fellow in Playwriting at Playwrights’ Center. Gethsemane is a winner of the Columbia@Roundabout Reading Series, a winner of the 45th Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival, a recipient of the 2022 Helen Merrill Award, a 2025 O’Neil Conference finalist and a member of the 2023 Kilroy’s Web. She received her MFA in Playwriting in 2019, studying under Chuck Mee, Lynn Nottage, and David Henry Hwang.
About The Apollo
The legendary Apollo—the soul of American culture—plays a vital role in cultivating emerging artists and launching legends. Since its founding, The Apollo has served as a center of innovation and a creative catalyst for Harlem, the city of New York, and the world. In 2024, The Apollo opened The Apollo Stages at the Victoria Theater, marking the first ever expansion in its 90-year history. The Apollo also has plans to renovate its historic theater.
With music at its core, The Apollo’s programming extends to dance, theater, spoken word, and more. This includes the world premiere of the theatrical adaptation of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and the New York premiere of the opera We Shall Not Be Moved; special programs such as the blockbuster concert Bruno Mars Live at the Apollo; 100: The Apollo Celebrates Ella; and the annual Africa Now! Festival. The non-profit Apollo is a performing arts presenter, commissioner, and collaborator that also produces festivals, large-scale dance and musical works organized around a set of core initiatives that celebrate and extend The Apollo’s legacy through a contemporary lens, including the Women of the World (WOW) Festival as well as other multidisciplinary collaborations with partner organizations.
Since introducing the first Amateur Night contests in 1934, The Apollo has served as a testing ground for new artists working across a variety of art forms and has USHERed in the emergence of many new musical genres—including jazz, swing, bebop, R&B, gospel, blues, soul, and hip-hop. Among the countless legendary performers who launched their careers at The Apollo are Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight, Luther Vandross, H.E.R. D’Angelo, Lauryn Hill, Jazmine Sullivan, Machine Gun Kelly, and Miri Ben Ari; and The Apollo’s forward-looking artistic vision continues to build on this legacy. For more information about The Apollo, visit www.ApolloTheater.org.
About WP
WP Theater, now in its 47th Season, is the nation’s oldest and largest theater company dedicated to developing, producing and promoting the work of Women+ at every stage in their careers. For almost five decades, we have served as leaders at the forefront of a global movement towards gender parity, and the example we set and the artists we have fostered have grown into a robust and thriving community of artists in theater and beyond. WP Theater received a 2018 Lucille Lortel Award, a 2019 Obie Award, and a 2020 Drama Desk Award, all for Outstanding Body of Work, recognizing WP’s unique place and vital work in the theatrical landscape. WP empowers Women+ of all kinds to reach their full potential and, in doing so, challenges preconceptions about the kinds of plays Women+ write and the stories they tell. As the premiere launching pad for some of the most influential Women+ theater artists today, our work has had a significant impact on the field at large. Nearly every prolific female theater artist has been through our doors, including 2024 Tony Winner for Best Direction of a Musical, Danya Taymor, 2019 Tony Winner for Best Direction of a Musical, Rachel Chavkin, 2018 Tony Winner for Best Direction of a Play, Rebecca Taichman, 2013 Tony Winner for Best Direction of a Play, Pam MacKinnon, 2013 Tony Winner for Best Direction of a Musical, Diane Paulus, 2023 Pulitzer Prize Winner Eboni Booth, 2018 Pulitzer Prize Winner Martyna Majok, and two-time Pulitzer Prize Winner Lynn Nottage. These powerful women found an artistic home at WP and are a testament to our role as a driving cultural force.
WP was founded in 1978 by visionary producer, Julia Miles, to address the significant under-representation of women in theater. Today, WP accomplishes its mission through several fundamental programs, including: the WP Lab, a celebrated two-year mentorship and new play development program for Women+ playwrights, directors, and producers; the Space Program subsidized rental program; the Developmental series of workshops and readings; the Commissioning series, and the Mainstage series, which features a full season of Off-Broadway productions written and directed by extraordinary theater artists. Current artists under commission are: Donnetta Lavinia Grays, Emily Kaczmarek, MJ Kaufman, Zizi Majid, Rehana Mirza, Zoe Sarnak, Rachel Wax, and Leah Nanako Winkler. WP is proud to have the legendary New Federal Theater as our Resident Company. wptheater.org
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Jar of Fat
By Seayoung Yim
In partnership with Theatre Battery
About the play
In a fantastical fairy-tale world, two Korean American sisters are deemed too fat to fit in their family grave. Will the sisters’ close bond survive under the pressure of their community and fretful parents, who will spare no effort to make them tinier?
About the playwright
Seayoung Yim is a playwright and educator based in NYC. She is the winner of the 2024 Dramatist Guild’s Lanford Wilson Award, the 2022 Yale Drama Series Prize, the Woolly Mammoth x Black List commission, and the Powers Playwriting Fellowship at the Old Globe. She is a member of Clubbed Thumb’s ECWG, the Colt Coeur Residency, a legacy labbie of Ma-Yi, and is commissioned by The Public Theater x CTG. Other honors include: Kilroys Web, Hedgebrook residency, Sewanee Writers’ Conference fellowship, finalist – 2024 L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award. Past teaching: Brown University and RISD. MFA: Brown University. www.seayoungyim.com
About Theatre Battery
Founded in Kent, Washington, in 2011, Theatre Battery serves a diverse suburban Pacific Northwest audience with storytelling events and media, made accessible with Radical Hospitality: No Cost Admission for All Audiences. In partnership with the city and local businesses, the company runs an annual summer program that occupies vacant retail and warehouse locations, converting found spaces into performing arts installations. With a focus on material that ignites discussion in the Kent community, Theatre Battery’s past new play projects include Hooded or Being Black for Dummies by Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm, Alma by Benjamin Benne, We Are Pussy Riot or Everything is PR by Barbara Hammond, Deep Purple Wiggle by Milo Cramer, Kiki’s Delivery Service by Eiko Kadono, and the stop motion animated webseries LEGO Harry Potter and the Transgender Witch. theatrebattery.org