The Legacy Playwrights Initiative shines a spotlight on the achievements and influence of playwrights whose work has fallen out of the public eye.
The Legacy Playwrights Initiative has named Carlyle Brown and Milcha Sanchez-Scott the recipients of the 2022 Legacy Playwright Awards.
The Legacy Playwrights Initiative shines a spotlight on the achievements and influence of playwrights whose work has fallen out of the public eye. To that end, the Dramatists Guild Foundation and a constellation of theater professionals, publishers, and educators have teamed up to create a pathway to rediscovery for these Legacy Playwrights' lifetime bodies of work, and to provide financial support for the exigencies of late life.
Carlyle Brown is a playwright/performer, curator and artistic director of Carlyle Brown & Company based in Minneapolis. His plays have been produced at theatres across the country and internationally. He is an alumnus of New Dramatists and a Life Time Core Writer at the Playwrights' Center. He has received numerous commissions, fellowships and awards including 2006 Black Theatre Network's Winona Lee Fletcher Award for outstanding achievement and artistic excellence, a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2010 Otto Rene Castillo Award for Political Theatre, a 2010 United States Artist Fellowship a 2018 William Inge Award for Distinguished Achievement in the American Theater and a 2019 Hellen Merrill Award recipient. A scholar and historian, Brown has been an artist in residence or visiting professor at several colleges and universities, and has worked as a museum exhibit writer and story consultant. He is curator of the Cultural Diaspora Playwrights Residency at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France and The Afro-Atlantic Playwrights' Festival presented in partnership with The Playwrights' Center in July 2019. His solo shows include The Fula from America: An African Journey, Therapy and Resistance, The History of Religion and Acting Black: Demystifying Racism, created to inspire open and honest conversations about race and diversity. He is a trustee of The Camargo Foundation and is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Playwright-in-Residence at Illusion Theater in Minneapolis.
Milcha Sanchez-Scott is the daughter of a Colombian-Mexican agronomist father and a Dutch Indonesian-Chinese mother. She was born on the island of Bali and was raised in San Diego. She is a graduate of the University of San Diego.
Milcha has written six plays that have been produced: Latina, The Cuban Swimmer, Dog Lady, Roosters, Evening Star, and The Old Matador. She is currently working on a unique mariachi musical entitled Leti's Wedding.
She holds a First Level Award for American Playwrights from the Rockefeller Foundation for 1987. In 1983 Ms. Sanchez-Scott won the Vesta Award, given each year to a West Coast woman artist, and the Le Compte du Nuoy Foundation Award, which goes to "a young writer with a unique voice." In 1983-84 she was a member of INTAR Theatre's Hispanic Playwrights-in-Residence Laboratory, directed by Maria Irene Fornes.
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