The Kennedy Center is the nation's busiest performing arts center, hosting approximately 3,000 events each year for audiences numbering more than 2 million. Since 1971, the Center been bringing the world to Washington with magnificent performances of music, dance, theater, and more.
The Kennedy Center has a long history of supporting new work and commissions creators across disciplines. The Page-to-Stage Festival has, for sixteen years, celebrated new writing in the DC and Baltimore metro area...
The Kennedy Center is the nation's busiest performing arts center, hosting approximately 3,000 events each year for audiences numbering more than 2 million. Since 1971, the Center been bringing the world to Washington with magnificent performances of music, dance, theater, and more.
The Kennedy Center has a long history of supporting new work and commissions creators across disciplines. The Page-to-Stage Festival has, for sixteen years, celebrated new writing in the DC and Baltimore metro area with a multi-day free showcase of concert readings, open rehearsals and workshops attended by over 3000 audiences members annually. Kennedy Center Theater for Young Audiences produces up to four commissioned works each season, some of which receive national tours.
In qualitative terms, the forty-eight year commitment to new work represented by the Kennedy Center’s playwriting programs (either the Michael Kanin Playwriting Awards and the attendant award residencies, or the MFA Playwrights’ Workshop, produced annually at the Kennedy Center in association with the National New Play Network) has had, of all of the theatre disciplines the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival celebrates, the most significant and lasting impact on the American Theatre. It’s important to stress that we don’t take "credit" for their careers, but are enormously proud of having supported their work while they were students.
Our playwriting alumni have received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (Paula Vogel, Quiara Alegría Hudes, and Martyna Majok); the Obie (Kirsten Greenidge); the Kleban Prize and Fred Ebb Awards (to Sam Willmott); the Fred Ebb Award, Jonathan Larson Grant and ASCAP’s Lorenz Hart Award (to Michael Kooman and Christopher Dimond); Tony Awards (Stephen Karam and Quiara AlegrÍa Hudes); and MacArthur Grants (Sarah Ruhl and Samuel D. Hunter), and Ike Holter, a four-time awardee of our program making his artistic home in Chicago, is currently enjoying a season of premieres concurrent with a retrospective of his work in theatres across that community.
Recent Kennedy Center awardees have enjoyed, or are enjoying, residencies at SPACE on Ryder Farm: Dave Harris, Yilong Liu, Daria Miyeko Marinelli, Madhuri Shekar, and Charly Evon Simpson, plus Sarah Ruhl and Antoinette Nwandu, from the earlier 2000’s.
Our Kanin Awardees have appeared on top-ten and “most-produced” lists (Katori Hall and Joshua Harmon), and many are writing for TV, Amazon Prime and Netflix while maintaining and growing their playwriting careers on This is Us, GLOW, Shameless, The Americans, Empire, Queen Sugar, Get Shorty, Grace and Frankie, Pure Genius, Penny Dreadful, Sons of Anarchy, New Girl, Weeds, Orange is the New Black, Bates Motel, The Affair, Nurse Jackie, Daredevil, The Defenders, Luke Cage, Southland, and Suits, among others.
We have ten Alumnae on the 2017 Kilroys list, ten on the 2016 list, and thirteen on Kilroys 2015 and 2014.
To date, seventeen of our alumni have had National New Play Network Rolling World Premieres (Jennifer Barclay, Hilary Bettis, George Brant, Tearrance A. Chisholm, Nathan Alan Davis, Gabriel Jason Dean, Zayd Dorhn, Jennifer Fawcett, Meredith Friedman, Diana Grisanti, Quiara Alegría Hudes, David Jacobi, Sean Christopher Lewis, Marisela Treviño Orta, Will Snider, Stephen Spotswood, and Lauren Yee.) Eight of our alums have been the recipient of the NNPN Smith Prize for Political Theatre: Jennifer Barclay, George Brant, Tearrance A. Chisholm, Jennifer Fawcett, Sean Christopher Lewis, Martyna Majok, Chris Weikel, and Martín Zimmerman.