Meet the 2025 Fellows!
Hello! My name is Orli Frank and I’m currently a junior at the Brooklyn Latin School. Ever since I was in elementary school, I’ve always loved theater –with the gorgeous costumes and the blinding stage lights, every time I watch a production it feels like a dream playing out before my eyes. What’s stood out to me above all are the stories that leave a true impact on the audience watching and I’m so excited to have the opportunity to learn how to write a play myself!
Orli Frank
Divyasri Pandey is a senior at Queens High School for the Sciences at York College and an incoming freshman at Brown University. For her, playwriting sprung from the quarantine tendency to reimagine text conversations as staged dialogue. She would soon join a teamof writers at her school’s drama club, where she discovered that even her dramatized daydreams made for great material. See, whether by masking flecks of reality in outlandish worlds or merely sensationalizing the mundane, plays spotlight the world’s happenings in motion. All playwrights like Divyasri must do is reimagine.
Divyasri Pandey
My name is Ariana White, I’m 16 years old and of Jamaican and Cuban Heritage. This fellowship has given me the opportunity to explore theater in New York and a chance to create a play I hope to will touch people’s lives.
Ariana White
I’m Chuer Zhong, a senior at Stuyvesant High School. I love writing about the mundane, the unheard, and everything in between. Stories like these anchored me in the moments where I felt all alone. As I flipped open a book, watched a movie, or went to a play, I realized that even centuries ago, people like Arthur Miller and Shakespeare wrote about characters grappling with the same frustrations and thoughts I was experiencing. Maybe a decade from now, or just around this time tomorrow, someone will think exactly thatas they read what I wrote. Isn’t that cool?
Cindy Zhong
About the Fellowship
The Lucille Lortel Theatre’s NYC Public High School Playwriting Fellowship will support diverse young writers and create an awareness of playwriting as a career. The opportunities provided by this program will encourage NYC public high school students to become the next generation of playwrights.
Seven Fellows will be selected: one from each of the five New York City boroughs plus two additional Fellows, one from District 75 and one from District 79 schools.
Submissions are now closed.
Meet the Artistic Director
Kimille Howard is a director, deviser, writer and filmmaker. She’s an Assistant Stage Director at the Metropolitan Opera, Artistic Director of the Lucille Lortel Theatre’s NYC Public High School Playwriting Fellowship, and a founder of the Black Diaspora Theatre Collective. Recent directing credits: The 2024 New Works Collective (Opera Theatre of St. Louis), Sanctuary Road (Virginia Opera), The Oscar Micheaux Project (NAMT Fest), Treemonisha (Opera Theatre of St. Louis), The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson (Glimmerglass/Washington National Opera, Opera Carolina), Songs in Flight (Sparks and Wiry Cries/Met Live), The Italian Girl (Tulsa Opera), American Apollo (DMMO), B.R.O.K.E.N Code B.I.R.D Switching (Berkshire Theatre Group), Quamino’s Map (Chicago Opera Theater). Her work has also been seen at Playwrights’ Horizons, 59E59, Wolf Trap Opera, Cherry Lane Theatre, among others. Broadway: Ain’t Too Proud (Assistant Director) Met Opera: Champion, Die Zauberflöte, Porgy And Bess, Tosca (Assistant Stage Director). Recent Fellowships: NYTW 2050 Fellowship, MTC Jonathan Alper Directing Fellowship, New York Stage and Film’s inaugural NYSAF NEXUS project. She is a recipient of OPERA America’s 2023 Robert L. B. Tobin Director-Designer Prize.
Meet the Teaching Artist
Nilan (he/him+) is the Associate Artistic Director of The Drama League of New York and a founder of the award-winning production company A Certain Something. He has been in over 35 theatrical, film, and television projects nationally and internationally. He is the co-host of the podcast TA(L)KING DIRECTION. His plays include Endangered Species, FOLKtales, Blood Promises, We Like To Party, The Rainbow Plays (a cycle of plays that chronicle queer life across the U.S. post-AIDS epidemic), and others. Recently, Nilan has helped co-facilitate and curate the first major International Directors Summit post-pandemic, gathering nine countries to together to talk art policy and cultural affairs. His tv show RENAISSANCE will be coming to a screen near you. Check out mywebsite for more information.
Get Inspired!
Highlights From The Fellowship Plays
This program was supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
