PRINCETON, N.J.: Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts has announced the selection of five Mary Mackall Gwinn Hodder Fellows for the 2025-26 academic year. This year’s recipients include performing and visual artist Satoshi Haga and playwright Catherine Yu.
Satoshi Haga is a performing and visual artist from Fukushima, Japan, who began his artistic career in the 1980s in New York City. He is a director of binbinFactory in New York City, collaborating with Rie Fukuzawa since 2010; the two merge Eastern and Western cultures through their dance and theatre performances. Their work has been featured in numerous venues and festivals, including DanceNow, Performance Mix Festival, and Le Festival de Bargemon in France.
Catherine Yu is a Chicago-based writer of plays and opera librettos. Her plays include In Spite of My Ambivalence, which was a 2024 Venturous Playwright Fellowship nominee; In Love and Friendship, which received a 2023 Second Round selection by the Austin Film Festival; Le Jeté, a 2019 Bay Area Playwrights Festival Semifinalist; and The Day Is Long to End, produced in 2018 at the University of Florida. She holds a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from New York University.
Hodder Fellows may be writers, composers, choreographers, visual artists, performance artists, or other kinds of artists or humanists who demonstrate, as the program outlines, “much more than ordinary intellectual and literary gifts.” Artists from anywhere in the world may apply in the early fall each year for the following academic year. In addition to creating new work, Hodder Fellows may engage in lectures, readings, performances, exhibitions, and other events at the Lewis Center for the Arts, most of which are free and open to the public.
The Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University believes that art arises out of questions. Its classes and minors in creative writing, dance, theatre and music theatre, and visual arts, and in the interdisciplinary Princeton Atelier operate on the principle that rigorous artistic practice is a form of research, innovation, discovery, and intervention.
PRINCETON, N.J.: In another project involving Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, the 2024-25 artists of the Next Forever—a collaborative initiative of the Lewis Center, the university’s High Meadows Environmental Institute, and the New York City-based theatre company the Civilians—have been named. They are writer/performer/composer Kate Douglas and playwright Kate Tarker. The Next Forever is a partnership that seeks to create new stories for a changing planet, exploring how dynamic storytelling can engage vital environmental subjects and provide the vision and inspiration society needs to navigate the challenges of our planet’s future—the “next forever.”
The two artists will spend time on the Princeton campus as guest artists, engage with faculty and students across disciplines, and participate in an ongoing series of public events and performances over the course of a year-long residency and two-year commissioning agreement. They join last year’s inaugural artists, Kareem Fahmy and AriDy Nox, who are continuing to develop the works they began during their residencies last year.
Douglas is a writer, performer, and composer. Her recent work includes The Apiary, nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award; Tulipa through New York Stage and Film; and hag with co-writer Grace McLean through the New Group. Her performance credits include Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, where she also held the title of associate artist; Liz Phair’s 30th anniversary tour of her seminal album Exile in Guyville; Fernando Rubio’s Everything by my side; Third Rail’s The Grand Paradise; and Kansas City Choir Boy, starring Todd Almond and Courtney Love. She holds a certificate in sustainable garden design from New York Botanical Garden.
Tarker is an American playwright who grew up bilingually in Germany. Her plays include Montag and THUNDERBODIES performed at Soho Rep, Dionysus Was Such a Nice Man at the Wilma Theater and FoolsFURY Theater, and Laura and the Sea at Rivendell Theatre Ensemble.
High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI)—the interdisciplinary center of environmental research, education, and outreach at Princeton University—strives to advance understanding of the Earth as a complex system influenced by human activities, and to inform solutions to local and global challenges by conducting groundbreaking research across disciplines and preparing future leaders in diverse fields to impact a world increasingly shaped by climate change.
Founded in 2001, the Civilians are dedicated to ambitious and exuberant new theatre that creatively interrogates our lived experience; questions and tests the stories that shape our world, and awakens new thinking and perceptions. The troupe’s signature work is “investigative theatre”— projects created through field research, community collaborations, and other methods of in-depth inquiry.
NEW YORK: The Entertainment Community Fund and Playwrights Horizons have announced that New York City creator and performer Alex Tatarsky is the 2024 recipient of the Mark O’Donnell Prize, an annual prize presented to an emerging theatre artist in recognition of their talent and promise. The award includes a cash prize, use of the Mark O’Donnell Theater at the Entertainment Community Fund Arts Center for one week to develop a reading of a new work, and counseling from the Entertainment Community Fund on two of the major challenges faced by emerging artists, how to apply for affordable housing and obtain health insurance.
Alex Tatarsky makes performances in the uncomfortable in-between zone of comedy, dance-theatre, performance art and deluded rant—sometimes with songs. Recent pieces include the sold-out Off-Broadway hit Sad Boys in Harpy Land (Abrons Arts Center, Playwrights Horizons), Dirt Trip (MoMA PS1), MATERIAL (Whitney Museum), Untitled Freakout (the Kitchen), Buttplug Gnome (Gibney Dance) and Americana Psychobabble (LaMama). Research interests include bootlegs, hellscapes, and compost.
The Entertainment Community Fund, formerly the Actors Fund, is a national human services organization that addresses the unique needs of people who work in performing arts and entertainment with services focused on health and wellness, career and life, and housing. Since 1882, the Fund has sought to ensure stability, encourage resiliency and be a safety net for those who shape our country’s cultural vibrancy.
Playwrights Horizons is a writer’s theatre committed to the advancement of bold and visionary contemporary playwrights through the development and production of daring new work and the education of future theatremakers. By expanding the U.S. theatre canon with a wider range of voices, Playwrights Horizons aims to be a home for the exploration of playwriting and an antiracist center of curiosity, dialogue, and artistic risk.
AUSTIN: Ground Floor Theatre (GFT) has announced the 2025 GFT Writes fellows: Mia Gomez-Reyes, Anikka Lekven, Briandaniel Oglesby, Jessica L. Peña Torres. GFT Writes is a yearlong fellowship for Austin-based playwrights whose work falls within Ground Floor Theatre’s mission of centering historically underrepresented communities.
Mia Gomez-Reyes is a Latina playwright, stage manager, and arts educator based in Austin, whose work explores grief, love, and a little bit of magic. Her plays have been featured in Teatro Vivo’s New Play Festival, UT New Theatre and Horizon Theatre New South Young Playwrights Festival. She has been a finalist for the Playwright’s Center Core Apprenticeship and the Austin Emerging Arts Leaders program. When she isn’t writing, she can be found listening to Taylor Swift, playing Dungeons & Dragons, and reading her library books. B.A. Theatre & Dance, UT Austin (2022).
Anikka Lekven is an actor, playwright, and producer based in Austin. As an actor, she has most notably been seen as #00 in The Wolves (Hyde Park Theatre) and Amy Macklin in Dry Land (Cap T Theatre). In 2023, Scriptworks commissioned Anikka’s one-act play, A Woman Manages Her Anxiety, for FronteraFest, which went on to be selected for the Best of the Fest Week. Her first full-length play, Hungry Teenage Track Stars, was the inaugural full-scale production for her theatre company, Broad Theatre. She is currently studying at the University of Houston, where she is pursuing her masters in theatre studies and concentrating on how playwrights depict abortion onstage.
Briandaniel Oglesby has his MFA in Playwriting from University of Texas at Austin, and he now writes plays for teenagers for a living. He runs the theatre department at Appamada School, developing experimental plays with young actors which have been published by Uproar Theatrics, Stage Rights, and Stage Partners. His plays for mature audiences include his full-length play Small Steps, which started as a ScriptWorks’ Out of Ink short before being developed at the JAW Festival, Playwrights Week at the Lark, B Street Theatre New Comedies Festival, and premiering locally with Shrewd Productions.
Jessica L. Peña Torres is a dance-theatre artist focused on Mexican identity and performance. She has a BA in dance and a BA in theatre from the University of Texas-Pan American and an MA in performance as public practice from the University of Texas at Austin, where she is now pursuing a PhD. In both Mexico and the U.S., she has worked and performed for organizations including Maru Montero Dance Company, Ballet Folklórico Nacional de México de Silvia Lozano, Teatro Vivo, Indigenous Cultures Institute, and Ground Floor Theatre. With her company, Coctel Explosivo, Peña Torres produces dance-theatre works that explore the intersection between nationalism and the performing arts in postrevolutionary México.
Now in its 10th season, Ground Floor Theatre (GFT) produces works focusing on historically underrepresented communities. It serves as an incubator to foster and grow new and groundbreaking works that shine a light on groups that are often overlooked and serves as a home for the Austin theatre community. Seeking passionate theatremakers who will benefit from an environment that nourishes and challenges them, Ground Floor Theatre accepts applications to its GFT Writes Fellowship annually.
FAYETTEVILLE, ARK.: The Arkansas Arts Council, an agency of Arkansas Heritage, has announced TheatreSquared as the recipient of a 2025 Governor’s Arts Award in the category of Arts in Education. They will be honored with other recipients on March 7, 2025 at Robinson Center in Little Rock.
TheatreSquared’s signature offerings of bold new plays in an intimate setting in downtown Fayetteville has driven its growth to become the state’s largest theatre, offering more than 350 performances annually in an intimate setting. The playwright-led company is one of mid-America’s leading laboratories for new work, having launched more than 70 new plays. Offering far-reaching access and education programs and an open-all-day gathering space, the Commons Bar/Café, TheatreSquared remains rooted in its founding vision, that “theatre—done well and with passion—can transform lives and communities.”
Arkansas Heritage was created in 1975 and is a division of the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage and Tourism. The Arkansas Arts Council, an agency of Arkansas Heritage, advances the arts in Arkansas by providing services and supporting arts endeavors that encourage and assist literary, performing, and visual artists in achieving standards of professional excellence. The council provides technical and financial assistance to Arkansas arts organizations and other providers of cultural and educational programs.
LITTLE ROCK, ARK.: The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts (AMFA) has announced Fergie L. Philippe as its next artist-in-residence. Becoming the museum’s first resident performing artist since its grand opening in April 2023, Philippe will direct AMFA’s upcoming Children’s Theatre production of An Unlikely Hero, teach a musical theatre master class, give an inspiring artist talk featuring live performances, and more.
Philippe is best known for playing Hercules Mulligan/James Madison in the Broadway production of Hamilton from 2020 to 2022 and starring as Sir Sagramore in the 2023 Broadway revival of Camelot reimagined by Aaron Sorkin. TV fans might recognize Philippe from guest appearances on The Gilded Age, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, Here on Out, and The Good Fight. Originally from Miami, Philippe studied musical theatre at Elon University in North Carolina and has taught at the Miami Dade College New World School of the Arts.
Written by Emilio Rodriquez, An Unlikely Hero is a joint production between AMFA, Metro Theatre Company in St. Louis, and Trike Theater in Bentonville, Ark., as part of the TYA BIPOC Superhero Project, an unprecedented national partnership involving 22 playwrights and 24 theatres for young audiences dedicated to creating a new generation of plays about heroes for young people.
Founded in 1937, the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts is the largest cultural institution of its kind in the state, offering a unique blend of visual and performing arts experiences. AMFA is committed to featuring diverse media and artistic perspectives within its permanent collection as well as through rotating temporary exhibitions.
SAN FRANCISCO: Crowded Fire Theater Company has announced Dilpreet Anand, Dan Holland, Jules Indelicato, Inéz Nuñez de Arco, Tajianna Okechukwu, and Ray Oppenheimer as the seventh cohort of Ignite Fund awardees. This year, the fund awarded nearly $8,000 to support the growth of and enhance the working lives of Bay Area theatre designers and technicians through a competitive grant process. grants can be used for professional development workshops and training opportunities, purchasing design tools and equipment, and strengthening the economic sustainability of an arts practice.
Crowded Fire Theater (CFT) is a critically acclaimed company known for new-play production on the West Coast. In developing and producing poetic, bold, relevant works by up-and-coming playwrights, CFT aims to contribute to the creation of a contemporary canon that reflects the diverse world in which we live.
