CHICAGO: United States Artists (USA) has announced the 2025 USA Fellows, a cohort of 50 artists and collectives from 10 creative disciplines. Honoring the contributions to their respective communities and the broader culture of the nation, each awardee will receive a $50,000 unrestricted cash award. Additionally, the fellows will receive access to a variety of professional services and field resources allowing for a deepened impact on their practice and supporting their essential roles in society.
The Fellows in the category of theatre and performance are:
- dots, a scenic design collective including Andrew Moerdyk, Kimie Nishikawa, and Santiago Orjuela-Laverde (Brooklyn)
- Geoff Sobelle, theatre artist (New York)
- Rhiana Yazzie, playwright and filmmaker (Minneapolis)
- Rudi Goblen, theatre artist (Miami)
- Shayok Misha Chowdhury, writer and director (Brooklyn)
Fellows are selected based on their groundbreaking artistic visions, unique perspectives within their fields, and evident potential for the award to make a significant impact in their practices and lives. Launched in 2006, the USA Fellowship is United States Artists’ flagship program, through which it has distributed over $41 million to date to more than 1,000 creative practitioners. As an unrestricted award, the USA Fellowship embodies the organization’s commitment to unconditional support of artists, giving awardees the agency to allocate the funds however they choose, whether it be toward expanding their practices, paying rent, acquiring healthcare, or investing in their communities.
United States Artists is a national arts funding organization based in Chicago that raises money and redistributes it in the form of unrestricted awards to the country’s most compelling artists and cultural practitioners. Since its founding in 2005, USA has awarded more than 1000 individuals with an excess of $50 million of direct support.
NEW YORK CITY: BTC (Building the Change) and Broadway stage manager and producer Cody Renard Richard have announced the next cohort of the Cody Renard Richard Scholarship program. The program is designed to build a bridge into the industry for emerging theatrical leaders of color working behind the scenes.
This year’s recipients include Jasmine Brooks (Yale University), Jeyna Lynn Gonzales (University of California, Irvine), Bell Hernandez (University of California, Irvine), Brissa Lopez (Columbia University), Savanha Moore (University of Iowa), Briana Newson (California Institute of the Arts), Andre Rodriguez (Texas State University), Salomé A. Ayers Sánchez (University of North Carolina School of the Arts), Tait Truong (Oklahoma City University), and KayCi Wolf (Texas State University).
Each student will receive a financial grant of $10,000, mentorship through various online seminars focusing on community building, leadership, and social justice, and an all-expenses-paid trip to New York City to meet with mentors and experience Broadway and New York’s theatre scene in person.
BTC was founded by T. Oliver Reid and Warren Adams in 2019. They identified the disparity between the growing inclusivity onstage versus the scarcity of Black professionals offstage. BTC’s mission is to remove the “illusion of inclusion” in the American theatre by building a sustainable ethical roadmap that will increase employment opportunities for Black theatre professionals.
Cody Renard Richard is a Tony-winning producer, advocate, educator, and professional stage manager with a career spanning many genres including Broadway, television, Cirque Du Soleil, and opera. He is currently an adjunct professor at Columbia University after previously serving as adjunct faculty at New York University and Fordham University.
BROOKLYN: The Farm Theater has awarded playwright Gina Femia their 2025-26 College Collaboration Project Commission. Femia will collaborate with students at Austin Peay University (Clarksville, Tenn.) and Pellissippi State (Knoxville, Tenn.) to write and produce a new play.
The College Collaboration Project has multiple schools commission an early-career playwright to write a play that each school will independently produce throughout the academic year. The faculty, students, and playwright collaborate throughout the year in the development of the text, which is intended to reflect the students’ thoughts on the theme suggested by the playwright.
Gina Femia is an award-winning playwright and performer whose work has been seen and/or developed at the Goodman Theater, MCC Theater, Playwrights Horizons, EST, Page 73, New Georges, the Playwrights Center, CTG, Theatre of NOTE, Rivendell Theater, Cape Cod Theater Project, Bag&Baggage, and Mirrorbox Theater, among others. Selected honors include the Kilroys List, Leah Ryan Prize, Doric Wilson Award, the Otis Guernsey New Voices Award and the Neukom Award in Playwriting, nominations for Drama League and NYIT.
Founded in 2013, the Farm Theater develops early-career artists that may not have the support system afforded others, through workshops, productions, and mentoring. The centerpiece of their programming is the College Collaboration Project, now in its 11th year, which has commissioned 12 playwrights and worked in collaboration with 20 colleges.
NEW YORK: Asian American Arts Alliance (A4) is pleased to announce the participants in What Can We Do? (WCWD?), an artist grant program offering $1,500 stipends to artists who use their creative skills to offer community care to Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) New Yorkers. The WCWD? program was created in 2022 in response to the alarming increase in anti-Asian hate and violence during the pandemic that has caused many people to experience grief, anxiety, and fear.
Over 20 artists and collaborators will present a total of 17 projects in an array of disciplines to bring aid, care, and cultural pride to the Asian New Yorker community with a focus on Chinatown, Manhattan; Flushing, Queens; and/or social justice projects that support NYC-based Palestinian creators and their communities, now through early June. The theatre projects awarded include:
- Waseem Alzer, Aya Aziz, and Sarah Bitar of Beitna Theater
- Jody Doo in collaboration with Spellbound Theatre
- Tiffany Troy, working on an Asian American Diasporic Poetry Symposium
Asian American Arts Alliance is a nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring greater representation, equity, and opportunities for Asian American artists and cultural organizations through resource sharing, promotion, and community building. Since 1983, A4 has sought to unify, promote, and represent the artistic and cultural producers of one of New York City’s fastest-growing populations.
NEW YORK CITY: The 14th Street Y has announced 13 artistic fellows for LABA New York, a Laboratory for Jewish culture. The fellows, a mix of visual artists, writers, dancers, musicians, actors, and others, include one theatremaker, director/playwright Leo Egger. Egger is the founding artistic director of the Eno River Players, a NYC theatre company devoted to classical theatre and original adaptations.
Each of the fellows will spend the coming year exploring the creative and intellectual inspiration behind the idea of “Change” through classical Jewish texts. The fellows will study these texts in a non-religious, open-minded setting, and use their learnings to inspire creative projects, which will be featured at the 14Y Theater in a culminating series of events and performances in the fall.
Founded in 2007, LABA NY is a program of the 14th Street Y that uses classic Jewish texts to inspire the creation of art, dialogue, and study.
