Nick Gandiello Named 2015 P73 Playwriting Fellow

PAGE 73 has awarded Nick Gandiello the 2015 P73 Playwriting Fellowship. Gandiello, who was selected from more than 450 applicants, will receive the company's top prize, which includes a $10,000 award and additional $10,000 budgeted for developing several new plays over the course of the year. Page 73 will also produce at least one public workshop for Gandiello this year.

"We're thrilled to support Nick in this important moment of creative and professional growth," said Page 73 Executive Directors Liz Jones and Asher Richelli. "Nick is poised as an artist to join the ranks of our past Fellows, including Quiara Alegría Hudes, Kirsten Greenidge, Heidi Schreck, and Clare Barron, and we are looking forward to working with him as he prepares for the next level of his career. Nick crafts plays full of complex characters, written personally and with deep feeling. He sensitively depicts characters not frequently seen onstage, who are striving to lead their best possible lives while often grappling with grief, and sets them against the backdrop of the cultural, economic, and political divisions of 21st century America."

In addition to Gandiello, Page 73 named five finalists for the 2015 P73 Playwriting Fellowship: Barbara Hammond, Jerry Lieblich, Martyna Majok, Antoinette Nwandu, and Amanda Jane Shank.

Now in its 12th year, the P73 Playwriting Fellowship is the company's most prestigious award, annually supporting a playwright who has yet to have a professional premiere in New York City. Past recipients include Pulitzer Prize winner Quiara Alegría Hudes, Obie winners Kirsten Greenidge and Heidi Schreck, and most recently Clare Barron, whose play You Got Older was also premiered by Page 73 in 2014 and recently named a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.

Page 73 also announced playwrights Greg Beam, Steve DiUbaldo, Jerry Lieblich, Brian Otaño, Gabrielle Reisman, Tracy Thorne, and Mfoniso Udofia members of the 2015 Interstate 73 Writers Group, which offers writers a year of bimonthly meetings to share new pages of works-in-progress. Each writer will also receive a reading over the course of the year.

Applications for Page 73's 2016 development programs are now available online at www.page73.org, and are due April 15, 2015. There is no fee to apply.

PAGE 73's most recent New York productions include three critically acclaimed premieres in 2014: the world premiere of You Got Older by Clare Barron, directed by Anne Kauffman, a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and a TONY Critics' Pick; the New York premiere of When January Feels Like Summer by Cori Thomas, directed by Daniella Topol, and co-produced with EST, which earned a NY Times Critics' Pick and was remounted by EST and Women's Project in fall 2014; and the New York premiere of Grounded by George Brant, directed by Ken Rus Schmoll, which earned a Drama Desk Nomination for actress Hannah Cabell and will be produced again this spring at the Public Theater starring Academy Award winner Anne Hathaway and directed by Julie Taymor. Founded in 1997, PAGE 73 is the premiere home for the development and production of new work by early-career playwrights who have yet to receive a professional New York production, offering a crucial steppingstone at a critical, early point in their careers. Each year, PAGE 73 produces New York City or world premieres by early-career playwrights and offers a slate of new play development programs: the P73 Playwriting Fellowship, Interstate 73, and a week-long Summer Residency.

NICK GANDIELLO is the 2015 P73 Playwriting Fellow. He attended Page 73's 2013 Summer Residency and was a member of the 2014 Interstate 73 Writers Group. His plays include Oceanside (Merrimack Repertory Theatre), Sunrise Highway (Ojai Playwrights Conference), Black Fly Spring (Xavier University), Swept (Williamstown Theatre Festival), At the Finish (Smith and Kraus's The Best 10 Minute Plays of 2014), and Teeming Shore (The Best 10 Minute Plays of 2015). He holds an MFA from The New School for Drama, where his play Off the Realness received a workshop production. He is an alum of the Ars Nova Play Group. He has attended residencies at The Blue Mountain Center and SPACE on Ryder Farm. For the screen, Nick developed and shot a television pilot, Substance, with Ready Set Go Productions. As a teaching artist, he led the Naked Angels 3 Thursdays Summer Style and their playwriting workshops in the GULD Conference. Nick is currently the Literary Manager of Young Playwrights Inc., for which he has led playwriting workshops in Virginia, Miami, and NYC.