text: BOSTON: HowlRound Theatre Commons has announced the newest members of the National Playwright Residency Program (NPRP). The initiative is supported by a three-year, $1,336,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The third cohort of NPRP includes a total of 13 playwright residencies in 9 states.
  Launched in 2013, the NPRP program promotes collaboration between institutions and individual artists. The playwrights will receive three years of full-time salaries to work at their selected host theatres. As part of the program, the theatres will produce at least one full production by the resident playwright during their residency.
  “We couldn’t be more thrilled for this support that will help us continue to amplify progressive and disruptive ideas about the theatre, and to deepen the impact of our core programs,” said HowlRound director and co-founder Jamie Gahlon in a statement. “In this period of acute devastation for individual artists, the questions posed by the National Playwright Residency Program remain urgent: How do we pay our artists equitably? Can we trouble the status quo and rethink the relationships between artists and institutions? In this moment of vast transformation and precarity, what does it mean to make a playwright essential and centered in a theatre institution?”
  The third cohort includes:
  - Nicole Brooks, Lookingglass Theatre Company in Chicago
  - Carlyle Brown, Illusion Theater and School in Minneapolis
  - Star Finch, Crowded Fire Theater & Campo Santo in San Francisco
  - Virginia Grise, Cara Mía Theatre Co. in Dallas
  - Basil Kreimendahl, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in New York City
  - M. Lewis, Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland, Ore.
  - Murielle Borst-Tarrant, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, New York City
  - Psalmeyene 24, Mosaic Theater Company in Washington, D.C.
  - Betty Shamieh, the Classical Theatre of Harlem in New York City
  - Regina Taylor, Repertory Theatre of St. Louis in St. Louis, Mo.
  - Cori Thomas, WP Theater in New York City
  - UNIVERSES (Mildred Ruiz-Sapp and Steven Sapp), Connecticut Players Foundation in New Haven, Conn.
  - Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay, Theater Mu in St. Paul, Minn.
  These 13 artists and theatres join the following residencies, which were renewed from Cohort Two and announced in November: Madeleine George/Two River Theatre, Red Bank, N.J.; Kirsten Greenidge/Company One Theatre, Boston; Lauren M. Gunderson/Marin Theatre Company, Mill Valley, Calif.; Rehana Lew Mirza and Mike Lew/Ma-Yi Theatre Company, New York City; Taylor Mac/HERE Arts Center, New York City; Herbert Siguenza/San Diego Repertory Theatre; and Vera Starbard/Perseverance Theatre, Douglas, Alaska.
  “This incoming group of writers and theatres are visionary folks that will offer such excellence, uplift, and forceful storytelling to the American theatre,” said Gunderson in a statement. “I’m overjoyed to be in their company.”
  A previous version of this post mistakenly listed Muriel Miguel as the resident playwright with La MaMa.