Sierra Blanco received the Kennedy Center’s 2024 National Ken Ludwig Portfolio Award for Playwriting- in recognition of an emerging artists body of work. Sierra was also a 2024 Kennedy Center KCACTF Region 1 Finalist and National Semi-Finalist for the Gary Garrison 10 minute play award with her play Getting Rid of Ferdinand (the mouse play.) Sierra subsequently received a Kennedy Center playwriting placement at the Wildwind Performance Lab in Texas, 2024.
Previously Sierra was a winner of the 2020 National Endowment for the Arts / American Theatre Wing's Musical Songwriting Challenge. She also won the Stephen Sondheim National Young Playwrights Competition, Writopia's Worldwide Plays Competition, NYC Write A Play! Competition, and the 2022 O'Neill Young Playwrights Festival at the...
Sierra Blanco received the Kennedy Center’s 2024 National Ken Ludwig Portfolio Award for Playwriting- in recognition of an emerging artists body of work. Sierra was also a 2024 Kennedy Center KCACTF Region 1 Finalist and National Semi-Finalist for the Gary Garrison 10 minute play award with her play Getting Rid of Ferdinand (the mouse play.) Sierra subsequently received a Kennedy Center playwriting placement at the Wildwind Performance Lab in Texas, 2024.
Previously Sierra was a winner of the 2020 National Endowment for the Arts / American Theatre Wing's Musical Songwriting Challenge. She also won the Stephen Sondheim National Young Playwrights Competition, Writopia's Worldwide Plays Competition, NYC Write A Play! Competition, and the 2022 O'Neill Young Playwrights Festival at the National Theater Institute. Her poetry was published in the New York Times and her play Bang! in A Decade of Shared Stories an anthology of the decade’s best teen writing across genres. Her play The Smallest Heroes is licensed and published by YouthPlays. Sierra was acknowledged by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards with Gold and Silver medals for multiple years in playwriting, poetry and fiction. She received the Perelstein Discover Your Passion Scholarship for Musical-Theater Composition, the 2020 National Music Publishers Scholarship, 2022 Davenport Theatricals Dr Kenny Encouragement Scholarship, a MENSA Scholarship, was a finalist for the Andrew Lloyd Webber Scholarship for Musical Theatre Composition, received the Fine Arts Award in Playwriting from Interlochen in 2019, SUNY’s M & J Bendheim Scholarship for 2022, 2023 and 2024, and the Kennedy Center Ken Ludwig Scholarship in 2024.
Sierra enjoyed four professionally staged productions of her work (at the O’Neill Young Playwrights Festival, The Actors Temple, Theater Lab NYC, Harold Clurman Theater), staged readings at the Cherry Lane Theater, Hunter College and Bryant Park, as well as several independently staged readings of her musicals in NYC and zoom productions of her plays. During the pandemic lockdown in May of 2020 Manhattan Theatre Club selected and featured her piece The Cat Monologue in their Student Monologue Challenge. New Musicals Inc produced her 15-minute musical The Cootie Conspiracy in July of 2022 in Los Angeles at the Broadwater Mainstage (book Sierra Blanco, lyrics Sara Rose Horton, music Xander Ambrose). Sierra maintains membership with the Dramatists Guild, Actors Equity Association, BMI, NPX, and MENSA. She is a volunteer Composer/Vocalist with Hear Your Song, a non-profit that empowers children with serious illnesses to make their voices heard through collaborative songwriting. As a performer, Sierra particularly enjoyed performing with Theatre de la Ville at BAM as well as with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show, and as the lead in the independent film Biff & Me. Sierra hails from New York, NY where she attended the Professional Children’s School and Hunter College High School. She received writing training from Writopia, Girls Write Now, SheNYC/CreateHer and Interlochen. Sierra attends SUNY Purchase in the Playwriting/Screenwriting major, and her recent screenplay Avalon Farms (Academy) has received multiple awards at independent film festivals nationally and internationally.