Winner: Ismail Khalidi
Tennis in Nablus
Born in Beirut to Palestinian parents and raised in Chicago, Ismail Khalidi is a playwright and director who has written, directed, performed, curated and taught internationally.
Khalidi's plays include Tennis in Nablus (Alliance Theatre, 2010), Truth Serum Blues (Pangea World Theater, 2005), Foot (Teatro Amal, 2016-17), Sabra Falling (Pangea World Theater, 2017), Returning to Haifa (Finborough Theatre, 2018) and Dead Are My People (Noor Theatre, 2019). Khalidi's plays have been published in numerous anthologies. His writing on politics and culture has appeared in The Nation, Guernica, American Theatre Magazine, and Remezcla. His poetry and plays have been published by Mizna , and he co-edited Inside/Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora (TCG, 2015). Khalidi has received commissions from the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Noor Theatre, Pangea World Theatre, and The Public Theatre, and is currently a Visiting Artist at Teatro Amal in Chile. He holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.
Dana lynn Formby
The Small of her back
Dana Lynn Formby is the current theatre instructor at Front Range Community College at the Larimer Campus. Her television pilot was a 2022 second-rounder for the Austin Film festival and is in the top 21% on Coverfly. She is a Bloomsbury Methuen published playwright. She is a finalist or semifinalist for the 2015, 2016, and 2017 Princess Grace Award for playwriting. Her play The Labeler, was a 2016 finalist for the American Blues Theatre Blue Ink Award and was read at Luna Stage in 2017. Her play Johnny 10 Beers' Daughter was a finalist for the O'Neill 2016 National Playwrights Conference and the 2016 Emory Fellowship in playwriting. It was produced in 2017 by Something Marvelous and Chicago Dramatists. Her play American Beauty Shop was developed at Bloomington Shakespeare Festival, read at Steppenwolf’s First Look 2014 and produced by Some Company of Sydney Australia as well as Chicago Dramatists. Dana is a three time ‘Kilroy Honorable Mention’ playwright. Her plays have been produced, workshopped, or developed by Pegasus Theatre Chicago, Stage Left, Chicago Dramatists, Mortar Theatre Company, Steep, PICT, Victory Gardens, WordBRIDGE, Florida Studio Theatre, The Alliance Theatre of Atlanta, The Kennedy Center, Theater Emory, The Department of Cultural Affairs of Chicago, and New York Theatre Workshop. Her short play A Deck of Monsters was featured in Goodman Theatre's New Play Bake-Off. Her play Until Death was produced in 2015 at Concordia University Chicago in association with Chicago Dramatists. She holds an MFA in playwriting from Ohio University. She has been commissioned by Theater Emory.
Virginia Grise
blu
Virginia Grise is a recipient of the Alpert Award in the Arts, Yale Drama Award, Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Princess Grace Award in Theatre Directing. Her published work includes Your Healing is Killing Me, blu, The Panza Monologues and an edited volume of Zapatista communiqués titled Conversations with Don Durito. Her interdisciplinary body of work includes plays, multimedia performance, dance theater, performance installations, guerilla theater, site specific interventions, and community gatherings. She holds an MFA in Writing for Performance from the California Institute of the Arts and is a founding member of a todo dar productions. Currently she serves as the Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence at Cara Mia Theatre.
Emily Schwend
Splinters
Emily Schwend's plays include Utility (The Amoralists in NYC, Orange Tree Theatre in London, Interrobang Theatre Project in Chicago, 2016 Yale Drama Series Award, 2017 IT Award for Outstanding Premiere Production of a Play), The Other Thing (Second Stage Theatre Uptown), Take Me Back (Walkerspace in NYC, The Poor Theatre in Chicago), South of Settling (Steppenwolf's Next Up Rep), and Splinters (CUDC Source Festival). She was a 2016-2017 Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard University and the inaugural 2014 Tow Foundation playwright-in-residence at Second Stage Theatre. Her work has been developed at The New Group, Roundabout Theatre Company, ACT Theatre, Marin Theatre Company, Partial Comfort Productions, Ars Nova, Alliance Theatre, PlayPenn, and the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, among others. She is a frequent contributor to Christine Jones’s Theatre for One booth. She is the recipient of a Bogliasco Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship, the ACT New Play Award, the David Calicchio Emerging American Playwrights Prize, the Lecomte du Nouy Prize, and the Heideman Prize. Her work has been commissioned by the Studio Theatre in DC, the Ensemble Studio Theatre through the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Old Vic in London. Emily also works as a science communicator in the biotech and biopharma hub of Cambridge, MA. She is a proud alumna of the playwriting programs at Juilliard and Tisch.
Paul David Young
No one But you
Paul David Young's All My Fathers was presented by La MaMa E.T.C. in New York in fall 2019 as part of La MaMa's 58th season. Evan Yionoulis, an Obie winner, formerly Professor in the PracIce of AcIng and DirecIng at Yale School of Drama and Resident Director at Yale Repertory Theatre for twenty years and now Richard Rodgers Director of Drama at Juilliard, directed the production, which was praised in The New Yorker ("hilarious "); The Reviews Hub (five stars * * * * *: "All My Fathers is remarkable work and should not be missed."); Interludes (RECOMMENDED); Theater Is Easy ("performances that are both hilarious and poignant"); Theater Pizzazz ("Young’s humor is salient and sardonic. The actors are just terrific."); and LighAng & Sound America (“Packed with curveballs, All My Fathers is also a work of considerable literacy.”).
His 2017 Trump Satire, Faust 3: The Turd Coming, or The Fart of the Deal, performed by four clowns at Judson Church, was featured in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, New York Magazine, Time Out New York, Village Voice ("Voice Choice"), The Wall Street Journal, and Hyperallergic. Upstage Downstage picked his play Kentucky Cantata, at HERE in New York, as one of the top 13 plays of Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway for 2015. Erik Haagensen of Backstage selected his play In the Summer Pavilion in NYCFringe and at 59e59 Theaters as a "Critic's Pick." His No One But You won the Kennedy Center’s Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and was a finalist for the Kendeda Fellowship. His one-act Aporia was a finalist for the Kennedy Center's John Cauble Short Play Award. His translations, with Carl Weber, of Heiner Müller’s Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome and Macbeth were published as Heiner Müller: After Shakespeare. A contribuIng editor at PAJ (MIT Press), he writes regularly for Hyperallergic. His book newARTtheatre: Evolutions of the Performance Aesthetic, about visual artists appropriating theatre, was issued by PAJ in 2014. He has had residencies at Lower Manhahan Cultural Council's Workspace, Millay Colony, Djerassi Resident ArIsts Program, and Ensemble Studio Theatre's Summer Conference. LMCC awarded him a five-month Process Space residency on Governors Island for 2015, where he conceived and performed Curtain Wall Part 3: An Immersive Landscape Theater Performance of Christopher Marlowe's "Hero and Leander," in which he swam across New York Harbor.
