...home for creative emerging black playwrights
Liberation Theatre Company Writing Residency Program 2024/25
Our FOUR Playwrights:
Cris Eli Blak is the winner of the Black Broadway Men Playwriting Initiative, Charles M. Getchell New Play Award, Atlanta Shakespeare Company's Muse of Fire BIPOC Playwriting Festival, the recipient of the Emerging Playwrights Fellowship from The Scoundrel & Scamp Theatre and is currently an artist-in-residence with Abingdon Theatre Company.
Zachariah Ezer is an American playwright whose work animates theoretical quandaries through theatrical forms. His plays include The Freedom Industry (Playwrights Horizons’ New Works Lab, The Playwrights Center, New York Stage & Film), Address the Body! (The University of Texas at Austin’s UTNT Festival, Kitchen Dog Theatre’s New Works Festival, Echo Theater Company’s National Young Playwrights in Residence), and Legitime (Fault Line Theater's Irons in the Fire), among others. He is a Dramatists Guild Foundation Catalyst Fellow, the winner of Kumu Kahua Theatre’s Hawai’i Prize, a member of The Civilians R&D group, and is currently under commission from Theater J. MFA: The University of Texas at Austin. BA: Wesleyan University
Mya Ison (she/her) is an actor/playwright from North Carolina. Her plays are a relentless search for Black voices in the places where they’ve been erased: in the ordinary, in the future, and in the archive. Playwriting accolades: Laure (Workshopped at NYTW and The Tank NYC in 2023); 2023 Bay Area Playwrights' Festival Finalist, 2024 O’Neill New Playwrights’ Conference Semi-Finalist.
Abigail C. Onwunali is a 2022 Princess Grace Award Winner. As a writer, her play, Jewel, was a Red Bull Theater’s Short New Play Festival winner and her slam poems have been viewed worldwide. She received her MFA from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and was an inaugural student for the Lena Waithe’s Hillman Grad
Mentorship Program.
We are excited by the opportunity to work with this year’s group of playwrights.
Liberation Theatre Company Writing Residency Program 2024/25
All four of them have only recently started their careers but view this residency as a chance to focus on their writing in the company of people who will understand and support them. To provide a supportive, nurturing yet challenging environment for Black playwrights has been our objective since Year One of the program. Sandra A. Daley-Sharif