Literary Managers And Dramaturgs Of The Americas Announces 2019 Grant Recipients

LMDA has announced the recipients of its 2018-19 grants and awards programs.

The Elliott Hayes Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dramaturgy

This award recognizes excellence in dramaturgical work on a specific project over the past two years. It is named in honor of Elliott Hayes, the former dramaturg and literary manager at The Stratford Festival and a dual citizen of Canada and the USA.

The recipient of the 2019 Elliott Hayes Award is Anne G. Morgan for her role in leading Shakespeare's New Contemporaries, a bold initiative producing new plays engaging Shakespeare's work.

Shakespeare's New Contemporaries is the American Shakespeare Center's groundbreaking, industry-changing undertaking to discover, develop, and produce a new canon of 38 plays inspired by and in conversation with Shakespeare's work. It's an opportunity for playwrights of every background, perspective, and style to engage with Shakespeare and his stage practices. It's ASC's chance to bring living writers into the world's only recreation of Shakespeare's indoor theatre: the Blackfriars Playhouse.

Morgan receives $1,000 in recognition of her achievements.

The Field Grant

This grant of $1000 is given annually to support a dramaturg-led project that fosters an expanded understanding of the dramaturgical field.

This year's recipient is Gabriela Aparicio for her proposal "Expedition: in the Search for the Dramaturg in Mexico." Expedition was born out of the need for creating spaces to reflect about the work of the Dramaturg in Mexico. The project consists of two stages. The first is to bring together a group of students and alumni from different artistic schools (theatre, dance, plastic arts, etc.) with the goal of finding a way for said disciplines to collaborate with a dramaturg in their field. With the reflections from the first stage of the workshop, the Second Stage develops: an artistic piece, whose goal will be to show the participants' skills and demonstrate the connection that a dramaturg can reach with an audience.

The Early Career Dramaturg Residency Grant

This $1500 grant supports an early career dramaturg's mentorship in a professional setting.

Matthew Boerst received this grant, to assist dramaturg and cultural consultant Saymoukda Vongsay at Penumbra Theatre Company, on their co-production with Theater Mu of The Brothers Paranormal by Prince Gomolvilas.

The Innovation Grant

LMDA is pleased to announce the recipient of our inaugural Innovation Grant, which awards $1500 to support an artist who is pushing the boundaries of dramaturgical work.

The first annual Innovation Grant has been awarded to Magda Romanska for launching Performap.com, an interactive digital map of global theatre festivals.

With hundreds of festivals browsable and searchable by festival location, type, and date, Performap is the first extensive digital index of its kind in the field. It is built expressly for artists, audiences, critics, scholars, festival organizers, curators, and presenters from around the world. Performap also includes reports written by local writers and traveling reporters published by TheTheatreTimes.com. Its primary purpose is to facilitate real-time access to festivals worldwide, ideally by increasing public awareness and ticket sales, but it also articulates the contours of festival circuitry through the collection and organization of measurable data. This data is open access so that anyone has permission to use its digital archive, run quantitative analyses, and create visualizations, maps, and models of its contents.

The Leon Katz Award for Teaching and Mentoring

This newly-created $1000 award recognizes an individual's service to their mentees and impact on their community, and is named in honor of the late and renowned dramaturg, educator, scholar, and playwright Dr. Leon Katz (1919-2017).

Its inaugural recipient is Paul Walsh, Professor in the Practice of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the Yale School of Drama. He has has taught causes in theater history, dramatic literature, and translation for the stage at Yale since 2008. Prior to coming to Yale, he taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (2005-2008) and Southern Methodist University (1989-1996). Walsh has also worked as a production dramaturg and translator. He holds a Ph.D. from the Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama at the University of Toronto.

The funds for this award were raised by the Leon Katz Memorial Celebration Committee in Los Angeles. LMDA thanks C. Raul Espinoza, Jared Stein, and Adam Versényi for their work in making this award possible.

More details on all of these dramaturgs and their projects can be found at lmda.org.

LMDA annually gives $7,000 directly to individual dramaturgs in support of their creative projects. For more information about Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, visit our Website at http://www.lmda.org or contact our administrative offices at lmdanyc@gmail.com.

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