The Black List And Woolly Mammoth Select Playwright Seayoung Yim For New Play Commission

It is with great pleasure that the Black List and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company announce Seayoung Yim as the recipient of the Woolly Mammoth x Black List Playwriting Commission. Yim will receive a $10,000 grant and work alongside the artistic team at Woolly Mammoth to write and develop a new play. Additional resources of $10,000, from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation, are earmarked to support the development of the play.

“Seayoung Yim is an exceptional choice for our commission partnership with the Black List. Seayoung's work sparks conversations about the absurd, grotesque, and often humorous intersections of race, gender, and the ways we belong to ourselves and each other,” said Sonia Fernandez, Director of New Work at Woolly Mammoth. “We are looking forward to developing new work with her that continues to explore, provoke, and innovate.”

Yim will collaborate with Woolly Mammoth to write a new play that reflects Woolly Mammoth's mission to produce courageous and invigorating new work that radically redefines theatre as a catalyst for an equitable, creative, and engaged society. 

“One of Woolly's guiding principles is to reimagine collaboration and forge unexpected partnerships that break down silos across industries, communities, disciplines, and mediums. Working in concert with the Black List to commission new works for the theatre exemplifies this spirit of abundance,” said Maria Manuela Goyanes, Artistic Director at Woolly Mammoth.

“It has been a joy and an honor to collaborate with Woolly Mammoth and Maria on this commission,” said Black List founder Franklin Leonard. “Their work has elevated ours, and we're looking forward to getting back to it immediately. Whatever Seayoung writes as part of the Woolly Mammoth community is going to be special.”

Woolly Mammoth selected Yim on the strength of her play JAR OF FAT, which won the 2022 Yale Drama Series Prize and will be published by the Yale University Press. The play, which is set in a fantastical world, explores the relationship between two sisters and the community pressures they face when they are deemed too fat to fit in their family grave.

Yim is an East Coast-based writer and educator from Seattle. Her previous honors include the NYTW Residency at Dartmouth College, Hedgebrook residency, a Playwriting Fellowship at Sewanee Writers' Conference, Stephen Sondheim Graduate Fellowship at Brown University, the People's Choice Award for Outstanding New Play at Theater Puget Sound's Gregory Awards, Seattle's Rose Lee Award for Excellence in Local Playwriting, second place winner of the Paul Stephen Lim Playwriting Award at The Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF), and Finalist: Playwrights Realm Scratchpad Series. Her work has been supported by Ma-Yi Theater, Clubbed Thumb, Seattle Public Theater's Education Program, Theatre Battery, Pony World Theatre, Live Girls! Theater, University of Washington School of Drama, The 14/48 Projects, SIS Productions, Pork Filled Productions, and Theater Off Jackson. She recently completed her MFA in playwriting from Brown University, where she also taught undergraduate playwriting and screenwriting. Yim teaches playwriting at the Rhode Island School of Design.

The Woolly Mammoth x the Black List Playwriting Commission is one of four playwriting commissions that the Black List launched to commemorate its expansion into theater in January 2022. 

To post a comment, you must register and login.