The National Theatre Conference Announces 2022 Award Recipients

The National Theatre Conference, is an organization of theater-makers that connects, supports, and advocates for the field. Each year leading academics and professionals gather in New York to engage in the essential questions of our art. NTC also honors new and long-time organizations and individuals who affect and inspire the field, and has named the recipients of its 2022 awards.The awards sessions will take place on Friday, December 2 and Saturday, December3.

Laurie Woolery is a director, playwright, educator, facilitator and producer. She has worked at The Public Theater, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Yale Repertory, Trinity Repertory, Goodman Theater, Cornerstone Theater Company, South Coast Repertory, Mark Taper Forum, Denver Center, Los Angeles Philharmonic, East West Players, Los Angeles Theatre Center, Inge Center for the Arts, Plaza de la Raza/RedCAT, Ricardo Montalban Theatre, Deaf-West Theatre, Highways Performance Space and Sundance Playwrights Lab as well as the Sundance Children's Theater. Woolery has directed world premieres of plays by Tanya Saracho, Mary Kathryn Nagle, Charise Castro Smith, Marisela Trevino Orta, Aditi Kapil, K.J. Sanchez, Julie Marie Myatt, Cody Henderson, Allison Carey and others. Currently, Woolery is the Director of Public Works at The Public Theater, an initiative that seeks to engage the people of New York by making them creators and not just spectators. Working with partner organizations in all 5 boroughs, Public Works invites members of diverse communities to join in the creation of ambitious works of participatory theater. In 2015, Woolery launched a new Public Works program called ACTivate (Artist, Citizen, Theater maker) that takes an ensemble of community members and puts them in the "artistic driver's seat." Complete bio at https://www.lauriewoolery.com/bio

Borderlands Theater, from Tucson, Arizona is awarded as the Outstanding Theatre in America. Robert Schenkkan wrote in his nominating letter, "For thirty-one years (!), Borderlands has been making important theater, locally sourced, but of National import." They have an inspiring mission of building, "...equitable, joyful, and meaningful collaborations with the local community through innovative theatre and responsive cultural programs ingrained in the heritage, narratives, and lived experiences of peoples rooted across the Sonoran Desert." Their work embodies their vision to develop and produce theater and educational programs that reflect the diverse voices of the U.S./ Mexico border region live in their work. Further, while focusing on the Latino/Chicano/Mexicano voice as the core voice to nurture and support, Borderlands works interactively with all voices of the region. The "border," both as physical and social landscape, is a metaphor for Borderlands' work. The metaphor allows, invites and even demands, both a regional and an international understanding of what it represents. Border people, in the best sense of the word, are citizens of the world.

The Stavis Award goes to Cathy Tagnak Rexford, an Inupiaq playwright, from the north slope of Alaska, for her new play, Cold Case. We will present a reading of the whole script (90 minutes) to theatre leaders. The reading will be directed by Leslie Ishii, Artistic Director of Perseverance Theatre, who wrote in her nominating letter "The play is focused on the subject of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), an issue that is painfully real and devastatingly present in the state of Alaska and throughout the rest of the country. In addressing MMIW, she offers a rarely seen side of the story: What is it like for the families of those who are taken. The script is funny, soulful and heartbreaking." See more at: https://www.nationaltheatreconference.org/stavis-release-22.html This honor is accompanied by a $2,000 honorarium and be read exclusively for the membership on Friday, December 2 and invited guests at The Players Club.

Laurie Woolery has chosen Esperanza Rosales Balcárcel to receive the Paul Green Award which recognizes and encourages excellence in new professional theatre talent. Esperanza Rosales Balcárcel (they/them) is a trans Guatemalan-American artist, born in Guatemala City and raised in Norwalk, CT. Selected plays include Spring on Fire: A Guatemalan Story (Austin Film Festival Playwriting Award Semi-Finalist), Crashing, Color Boy (Carlotta Festival), Lupe Finds Me in the Garden of Dreams (Langston Hughes Festival), and When the Party's Over (TheatreWorks Next Generation Festival). Esperanza's plays have been supported by TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, Roundabout Theatre, Princeton University Lewis Center for the Arts, and the Stanford Department of Theater and Performance Studies. Esperanza has worked with The Public Theater, HBO, United Talent Agency, and was a 2017 Teach for America corps member, serving in Huntington Park, CA as a 5th Grade ELA teacher for 120 students. Most recently, they formed a collective with other Queer Black and Latinx artists at Yale, who were then selected as Producing Artistic Directors for the 2022 Yale Summer Cabaret. 'The Collective' produced the first season ever dedicated to new play productions and workshops by Queer BIPOC writers called Summer of Love and in one summer raised over $30,000 for their artists. Esperanza is the recipient of the Princeton Ward Prize for Fiction, the A. Scott Berg Fellowship for English Research, the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Scholarship, and now the Paul Greene Award from The National Theatre Conference. Their writing is mentored by Anne Erbe, Brian Herrera, Christina Anderson, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sarah Ruhl, and Tarell Alvin McCraney, amongst others. They are a proud FGLI (First Generation Low-Income) student and a former ESL learner as well. All their words are in honor of their mom, who made the brave choice to leave Guatemala in hopes of a better life in America. May these plays reach a young writer one day and encourages them to tell their story. BA: Princeton ('17), MFA: Yale ('23).

Marc David Pinate, Artistic Director of Borderlands Theater, the NTC 2022 Outstanding Theatre Award recipient, has selected Jesús I. Valles to receive the NTC 2022 Emerging Professional Award! Jesús I. Valles (they/them) is a queer Mexican immigrant, educator, writer-performer from Cd. Juarez/El Paso. Jesús is a 2021 CantoMundo fellow at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, a 2021 Lambda Literary fellow, a 2019 Walter E. Dakin Playwriting Fellow of the Sewanee Writers' Conference, a recipient of the 2019 Letras Latinas Scholarship from the Community of Writers' Poetry Workshop, and a 2019 poetry fellow at Idyllwild Arts Writers Week. Jesús is also a 2018 Undocupoets Fellow, a 2018 Tin House Scholar, a fellow of The 2018 Poetry Incubator, and the runner-up in the 2017 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. Their work has been published in Shade Literary, The Texas Review, The New Republic, Palabritas, The Acentos Review, Quarterly West, The Mississippi Review, Palette, The Adroit Journal, BOAAT, The McNeese Review, and PANK. Their poetry has also been featured on NPR's Code Switch, The Slowdown, The BreakBeat Poets' LatiNext Anthology, the Best New Poets 2020 anthology, and the anthology, Somewhere We Are Human. As an actor, they are the recipient of four B. Iden Payne Awards, including Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama (2018), and Outstanding Original Script (2018) and they were nominated for the Mark David Cohen New Play Award for their play, (Un)Documents. Their playwriting work has received awards and support from OUTSider festival, Teatro Vivo, The VORTEX, The Kennedy Center, New York Theatre Workshop, and The Flea. Jesús is currently an MFA playwriting student at Brown University.

We are thrilled to be together again in New York and to celebrate this line up of artists that are the backbone of American Theatre. Maybe not who American Theatre has always been but who we are and have been for a long time. Let's celebrate the artists that lift our art form to a higher level.

Four new members will also be inducted in 2022. They are; Lyndsay Burch, Cynthia S Decure, Jack Reuler, and Rick Shiomi.

The National Theatre CONFERENCE

founded in 1925, is an organization limited to no more than 150 distinguished leaders nationwide, in commercial, non-profit and university fields, comprising, in no particular order, playwrights, directors, dramaturgs, actors, designers, producers, critics, choreographers, fight directors, historians, teachers, and technicians. NTC is dedicated to the continued development of theatre in this country under its tag line, "Connecting, Supporting and Advocating for America's Theaters since 1925." In addition to awards recognizing and celebrating excellence in the theatre, NTC works actively to promote positive change in the American theatre. More information can be found at www.nationaltheatreconference.org.