New York Theatre Workshop Announces 2050 Fellowship Recipients

New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) Artistic Director James C. Nicola and Managing Director William Russo have announced the new 2050 Fellowship Program to begin with the 2013/14 season.

The 2050 Fellowship Program expands NYTW's current "Emerging Artists of Color Fellowship" to support a wider range of artists of varied backgrounds and aesthetics. The new fellowship is comprised of artists whose work reflects and imagines the national cultural identity in the year 2050. The six 2050 fellows were chosen out of over 180 applications and represent a diverse collection of bold and innovative voices in the American theatre.

NYTW will provide fellowship recipients with essential support to assist their development, as well as access to the resources of an off-Broadway producing theatre and community of artists. Fellows will attend retreats and monthly meetings, participate in developmental readings and presentations to offer feedback and support for other Fellows' work, and engage with NYTW in varied capacities.

2050 Fellows will be granted rehearsal space, office facilities and equipment, casting assistance, mentoring, as well as additional opportunities and forms of support determined on an individual basis. Fellows will be awarded a stipend and project funds, and offered group theatre-outing opportunities.

The 2050 Fellowship recipients are:

HILARY BETTIS is a playwright and screenwriter. Awards, residencies, and commissions include: O'Neill National Playwrights Conference (Alligator), James McLure Fellowship New River Dramatists, Sloan/EST Commission (Dakota Atoll), John N. Wall Fellowship Sewanee Writer's Conference, Carol Ostrow commission (The Desert), Blackburn nomination (Mexico), Cherry Jones/Abingdon Theatre Company Grant. Finalist and semifinalist include: the Source Festival and Bay Area Playwrights Festival (Alligator), New Dramatists, and Juilliard Lila Acheson Wallace Fellowship. Readings and workshops include: New Georges, The Lark, EST, Abingdon, Barrow Street, Barefoot Theatre Company, Pavement Group, Project Y, Great Plains Theatre Conference, Carolina Coastal University, New River Dramatists, The Actors Studio, and The Aurora Fox in Denver. Productions include:American Girls (off-Broadway at 45th St. Theater) and The Mud Hole (off-off-Broadway F*IT Club). Publications include Smith & Kraus, McFarland & Company, Original Works (American Girls). Film screenings include Williamsburg Film Festival, IFS Festival (best actress), Nashville Film Festival finalist (B'Hurst). She is a member of SAG, AEA, Dramatists Guild, The Drama League, TCG, Playwrights' Center, and Fractured Atlas. She is a member of EST and an affiliated artist with New Georges. She is a staff writer foroffoffonline.com, and has contributed articles and essays to TDF Stages and HowlRound. She is currently working on an untitled feature with Oscar winning producer Mara Kassin.

Lileana Blain-Cruz is a director from New York City and Miami. Recent projects include Christina Anderson's Hollow Roots which premiered this past January in the Under the Radar Festival at The Public Theater and A Guide to Kinship and Maybe Magic, a collaboration with choreographer Isabel Lewis and playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins at Dance New Amsterdam. She is the co-founder and director of The Ensemble Company Overhead Projector, which devises new work. She received her MFA in directing from the Yale School of Drama, where she directed Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, The Taming of the Shrew, Tall Skinny Cruel Cruel Boys, Buffalo Maine, Cavity and Fox Play as part of the Carlotta Festival of New Plays. She was one of the Co-artistic directors of the 2011-2012 Yale Cabaret, where she directed Funnyhouse of a Negro, Vaska Vaska Glöm, and SALOME. She was an Artistic Associate of The Exchange and The Orchard Project, a member of the Lincoln Center Director's Lab, and an Allen Lee Hughes Directing Fellow at Arena Stage. She is a graduate of Princeton University. Lileana recently directed a new translation of The Bakkhai at the Fisher Center of Performing Arts at Bard College and is currently working on an adaptation of the Alejandro Jodorowsky film, EL TOPO.

Will Davis is an Austin based theatre maker focused on new and devised work. Both kinetic and visceral, you will know Will's work by the way it moves. Will has been recognized by the Chicago Tribune, TimeOut Chicago, The Austin-American Statesmen, and the Austin Chronicle, which listed Will'sThe Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a highlight of 2011. The play also received Outstanding Drama and Outstanding Direction awards by the Austin Critics Table Awards. Recent work includes: Lisa D'Amour's The Cataract, The Boy From the Circus, a devised ghost play for the hidden life of playwright William Inge, andColossal, a new play about football and feats of strength scored with a live drum line and head on collisions. Upcoming projects include Plays for Horses, a devised work for horses, and MacBeth in the dark. Will holds a B.F.A. in Theater Studies from The Theatre School at DePaul University, an MFA in Directing from UT Austin, and is a graduate of the Literary Apprenticeship Program at Steppenwolf Theater Company.

(MASHUQ) DEEN is a first-generation playwright and performer. Full-length plays: Shut-Up! (Dennis Johnston Playwriting Prize, James Baldwin Award); Where Children Play: the Story of Tank and Horse (Berkshire Fringe Festival); Draw the Circle (produced at InterAct Theatre and Hampshire College, after staged readings at The Public Theater, Dixon Place, Berksire Fringe, NYTW at Dartmouth, Passage Theatre, Queens Theatre in the Park). He is an affiliate artist with the Hemispheric Institute for Performance in NYC, which will present a reading of his work-in-progress 1984, about the Sikh massacres in India. Other: alumni member of The Public Theater Emerging Writers Group, Tofte Lake Center's Emerging Artist Retreat. His short plays have appeared at numerous theaters around NYC. He received his MFA at The Actors Studio Drama School/New School of Drama in 2006. (DeenThePlaywright.weebly.com)

REGINALD L. DOUGLAS is a freelance director with a passion for all aspects of new play development. The inaugural Van Lier Directing Fellow at the Lark Play Development Center, Reginald has directed extensively throughout New York at venues including Culture Project, Access Theater, LaMama/Fringe, Harlem School of the Arts, and many others, and regionally at McCarter Theatre and Luna Stage. He has assistant directed for several leading players in the field on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regionally, including Emily Mann, Sam Gold, Peter DuBois, Sam Buntrock, Ethan McSweeny, Daniel Beaty, Jo Bonney, Lynn Nottage, Zach Braff and others, and worked at several notable theaters including Manhattan Theatre Club, Second Stage Theatre, Arena Stage, Shakespeare Theatre Company and McCarter Theatre, where he served as a directing and producing assistant for Artistic Director Emily Mann's 20th Anniversary season. A nominee for the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation's prestigious Gielgud and Ockrent Fellowships, Reginald will next direct the premiere production of Ruby Place Nest on the Ground by Angelica Chéri at the new Pershing Square Signature Center and in the DC Black Theater Festival.

MICHEL HAUSMANN is a Venezuelan-born theater director, producer and writer. He is the co-founder and artistic director of Palo de Agua, a leading Venezuelan theater Production Company. Hausmann's Off Broadway credits include the New York Premiere of Vassily Sigarev's Black Milk at East 13th Theater and the New York premiere of The Color of Desire by Pulitzer Prize winning author Nilo Cruz at the Repertorio Español. In Venezuela he directed the world premiere of Los Navegaos, the last play by renowned Venezuelan playwright Isaac Chocrón as well as successful productions of Fiddler on the Roof, Jesus Christ Superstar and The Producers that enjoyed an audience of 170,000 spectators. With Moisés Kaufman, he co-directed the Venezuelan premiere of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. Michel received a BA from Emerson College and is currently finishing an M.F.A. in directing at Columbia University under Anne Bogart and Brian Kulick.

New York Theatre Workshop, now celebrating its 30th Season, is a leading voice in the world of Off-Broadway and within the theatre community in New York and around the world. NYTW has emerged as a premiere incubator of important new theatre, honoring its mission to explore perspectives on our collective history and respond to the events and institutions that shape our lives. In addition, NYTW is known for its innovative adaptations of classic repertory. Each season, from its home in New York's East Village neighborhood, NYTW presents three to five new productions, over 80 readings, and numerous workshop productions, for over 45,000 audience members. Over the past 28 years, NYTW has developed and produced over 100 new, fully staged works, including Jonathan Larson'sRent, Tony Kushner's Slavs! and Homebody/Kabul, Doug Wright's Quills, Claudia Shear'sBlown Sideways Through Life and Dirty Blonde, Paul Rudnick's The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told and Valhalla, Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest, Far Away, and A Number, Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen's Aftermath, and Rick Elice's Peter and the Starcatcher. The 2002 remounting of Martha Clarke's seminal work, Vienna: Lusthaus and subsequent American tour was one of the longest-running productions in NYTW's history. NYTW's acclaimed production of Once is currently enjoying a Broadway run, and Peter and the Starcatcher, which made its New York Premiere at NYTW, has returned to off-Broadway following a successful Broadway run. NYTW supports artists in all stages of their careers by maintaining a series of workshop programs including work-in-progress readings, summer residencies, and minority artist fellowships. In 1991, NYTW received an OBIE Award for Sustained Achievement and in 2000 was designated to be part of the Leading National Theatres Program by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The NYTW 2012/13 Season is dedicated to the memory of Joan Stein.