Pearl Cleage and David Greenspan to Receive 2025 Legacy Playwright Awards

NEW YORK CITY: Playwrights pearl cleage and David Greenspan have been announced as the 2025 recipients of the Legacy Playwright Awards. The Legacy Playwrights Initiative (LPI) shines a spotlight on the achievements and influence of playwrights whose work deserves greater visibility, including those who have fallen out of the public eye, and offers a pathway to rediscovery for their bodies of work and financial support for the exigencies of late life. They receive two monetary awards, advocacy for professional theater production of their work and for the reissuing of previously published plays, programs to raise awareness of their work within the theatre field and in universities, and filmed interviews highlighting their careers. Over the award year, the LPI team works with honorees to tailor this support to their specific needs and current artistic/career goals.

Pearl cleage is an Atlanta-based writer who serves as Distinguished artist in Residence at the Alliance Theatre and as Atlanta’s first poet laureate. A graduate of Spelman College,she is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Dramatists Guild and the Paul Robeson Award from the Actor’s Equity Foundation. She is the author of 15 plays, including Blues for An Alabama Sky, which recently concluded a run at London’s National Theatre, and Flyin’ West, which was the most produced new play in the country after it premiered at the Alliance in 1992. She is the author of eight novels, including What looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary day, an Oprah Book Club selection that spent nine weeks on The New York Times bestseller list.Her play Angry, Raucous and shamelessly Gorgeous is scheduled for a 2026 production at the Geffen Playhouse directed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson. She is currently working on a new play, Flying Fish & Folding Money.

David Greenspan has appeared in his plays Dead Mother, She Stoops to Comedy, Go Back to Were You Are, I’m Looking for Helen Twelvetrees, The Memory Motel; his solo plays The Argument and The Myopia; solo renditions of Barry Conners’ comedy The Patsy, Eugene O’Neill’s six-hour drama Strange Interlude and Gertrude Stein’s experimental Four Saints in Three Acts; premieres and revivals, notably Terrence McNally’s Some Men, Jordan Tannahill’s Prince Faggot, Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, Goethe’s Faust, and three solo plays: Joey Merlo’s On set With Theda Bara.

Regional News: Philadelphia, New York City, Chicago, and Akron

PHILADELPHIA, PA: The 2025 barrymore Awards for Excellence in Theatre were presented on Sept. 9 at Niches at Esperanza Arts Center. all Barrymore Awards recipients can be found here.

NEW YORK CITY: Stage directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF), the not-for-profit foundation of Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), has announced that director Bartlett Sher will be honored with SDCF’s “Mr. Abbott” Award. This award, given in honor of director George Abbott, recognizes a director or choreographer for their outstanding contributions to Broadway.It will be presented at the foundation’s gala on March 23, 2026 at Gotham Hall in New York City.

Sher was nominated for the Tony Award nine times and won for his 2008 revival of South Pacific for Lincoln Center Theatre where he was recently named executive producer.Other Broadway credits at Lincoln Center include The Light in the Piazza which premiered at Intiman Theatre; revivals of The King and I and My Fair Lady; the Tony-winning Best Play, Oslo by J.T. Rogers; and Aaron sorkin’s adaptation of To Kill a mockingbird which became the best-selling American play in Broadway history. In opera he has directed classics and new work. Most recently, he directed the world premiere of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay for the With opera.

CHICAGO: The Chicago-based nonprofit 3Arts has announced that it will award more than $1 million in grants to artists this fall, including 17 artists who will receive $30,000 in unrestricted 3Arts Awards grants in partnership with Artspace Southern Illinois.Theatre artists awarded grants include production designer Nina Castillo-D’Angier; actor and playwright Rommel Chan; movement artist, physical theatre creator, and puppeteer Chih-Jou Cheng; teacher, puppet artist, designer, and director tom Lee; and playwright, essayist, and dramaturg Kristin Idascak. They will be honored in a ceremony at Chicago’s Harris Theater on Nov. 10.

AKRON, OH.: The National Center for Choreography-Akron (NCCAkron) has announced choreographers Alice Sheppard (based in New york City and Los Altos,California) and Laurel Lawson (based in Atlanta),the leaders of disability arts company Kinetic Light as the recipients of the $50,000 Knight Choreography Prize. Made possible by the Knight Foundation.

NYC Arts Funding News – 2025/10/25 10:01:13

NEW YORK CITY: indiespace along with the Howard Gilman Foundation has announced the recipients of The Little Venue That Could grant program, which offers two-year $10,000 grants to NYC-based performance venues with annual budgets under $500,000. They are Brooklyn art Haus, Dixon Place, Green Space, Inspiration Point, IRT Theater, New Perspectives Studio, Noosphere Arts (Noo Arts), I AM Astoria, St. Lydia’s and the Little Victory Theatre. A weighted lottery system was used to determine grantees, with priority given to venues in the Bronx, queens, and Staten Island; venues whose NEA funding was withdrawn or terminated; venues who were established by, for, and are serving historically excluded artists; and who demonstrate values-driven work through community impact, board, and staff diversity and accessibility. This year, the program received 62 applications. IndieSpace is an organization established to disrupt the ongoing displacement of small theatres and to create a new model for equitable funding for the indie theatre community.

NEW YORK CITY: The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA) has announced the 35 artists who will receive its 2025 Creative Research Grants. Launched in 2024, the program awards $10,000 grants to artists to support critical, exploratory stages of the artistic process-assisting experimental artists in advancing their ideas and practices.The grants address a persistent gap in support for research and exploration: activities that are central to artistic advancement but rarely funded.

The program is part of a 10-year plan (2025-34) to expand FCA’s grantmaking, which was made possible by a transformative bequest from the estate of Margo Leavin, a pioneering L.A. galler