Overview

Launched in 2012, The I AM SOUL Playwrights Residency Program uniquely serves the best and brightest emerging Black playwrights from around the nation. Through this program, NBT seeks to foster mutually-beneficial relationships between Black institutions and creatives to re-establish historically Black theatrical institutions as the foremost supporters and producers of Black artistry. This 18-month residency aims to unleash the souls of two to three Black playwrights per cycle. Coined as a dream MFA program, this program is about process, not product, so playwrights experiment with form, style, and narrative to develop, hone and explore new ways of artistic expression in a nourishing environment.  Each resident is provided a financial stipend, dramaturgical and developmental resources, a full production team, and three 29-hour workshops.  

a.k.payne, 2023 Cohort

a.k. payne (she/they) is a playwright, artist-theorist, and theatermaker with roots in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her plays love on and engage Black lives and languages beyond the confines of linear time to find/remember stories that might create conditions for our collective liberation(s). They hold a B.A. in English and African-American Studies from Yale College and an MFA in Playwriting under Tarell Alvin McCraney from fka Yale School of Drama. Their work has been a finalist for the L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. She is a recipient of the David Mark Cohen National Playwriting Award, the Kemp Powers Commission Fund for Black Playwrights and Atlantic Theater Company's Judith Champion Launch Commission. Their work has been developed with the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, The New Harmony Project, Great Plains Theater Conference, Manhattan Theater Club's "Groundworks Lab." They are a proud graduate of Pittsburgh Public Schools; grandchild of the Great Migration; descendant of a music teacher and a carpenter, who both march every year with their unions in Pittsburgh’s Labor Day parade; a queer & non-binary abolitionist affected in community by the ‘New Jim Crow;” and of a great lineage of Black women storytellers and living-room archivists; all of which deeply informs, uplifts and amplifies their work as a playwright, community organizer and spacemaker.

jeremy o’brian, 2023 Cohort

jeremy o’brian is a playwright, songwriter, and theatre-maker from Lambert, Mississippi, whose work centers the experiences of black gay boys while drawing from the poetics of the black south, black popular culture, and the black vernacular tradition. He is an HBCU graduate of Tougaloo College and received his Master of Arts in African and African Diaspora Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He has received the New York Stage and Film Founders’ Award (2021), Liberation Theater Comapny’s Playwriting Residency(2019), Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Voice in Playwriting Fellowship (2016), and more. His plays include: egg; or anythin’ dipped in egg gone soften, a curious thing; or superheroes k’ain’t fly, under one roof; or home to Mississippi, and boys don’t look at boys. jeremy is an adjunct professor and Associate Writer with Tectonic Theater Project.

Zola Dee, 2023 Cohort

Zola Dee is a playwright, screenwriter, and performer whose works are deeply invested in exploring Black Americana, African diasporic religions, and imagining freer worlds for the Black collective body. Her most notable work GUNSHOT MEDLEY: Part 1 was Ovation Award recommended and published in Routledge’s Contemporary Plays by Women of Color. Her other plays include SMILE, GODDAMNIT, SMILE, Rain, River, Ocean, and Father, Father. Her work has been seen and/or developed with Antaeus Theater Company, CalArts Center for New Performance, Collaborative Artists Bloc, East West Players, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Hi-Arts, The Playwrights’ Center, Rogue Machine Theater, and Skylight Theater. While most of her artistic career has been based in Los Angeles, she is currently living in Minneapolis where she is a 2022-2023 Jerome Fellow at the Playwrights' Center. Other accomplishments include: member of Playwrights' Center Many Voices Fellow 2021-2022, CTG Writer’s Workshop 2019-2020 , 2017-2018 Core Apprentice at The Playwright's Center and the 2018 Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights Diversity Fellow. Zola is a graduate from California Institute of the Arts with a BFA in Acting and a minor in Creative Writing. She is currently a freelance writer for Meow Wolf and loves busting a move to some old school R&B and funk music. She is currently managed by Management 360 in Los Angeles. For more information, visit her website at www.zoladee.com !

Kristen Adele Calhoun, 2020 Cohort

Kristen Adele Calhoun is a writer, actor, producer and curator who loves Black people. Her work is inspired by red clay roads, her benevolent ancestors, the Atlantic Ocean, bloodline healing, fugitivity, sensuality, uprising and joy. She is a writer for HBO’s adaptation of Toni Morrison’s SULA created and helmed by showrunner, Shannon M. Houston. Kristen is also on the writing team for BLKNWS directed by Kahlil Joseph, produced by A24 and Participant.   She is an I AM SOUL Playwriting Resident at Dr. Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre, the founding Program Director of ArtChangeUS, an Assistant Editor of Contemporary Plays by Women of Color and a co-producer of InterFest, an intersectional arts and ideas festival that began at the Harlem School of the Arts. Kristen is the co-curator of BLKSPACE along with InterFest co-producer, Nikki Vera.  Time at BLKSPACE is granted to Black artists whose work forwards Black liberation. BLKSPACE seeks to simultaneously provide an expansive dreaming space for the individual and a collective practice ground for freedom. A native of Dallas, Texas, she splits her time between Ghana, Mexico and the United States of America. kristenadelecalhoun.com/

Nathan Yungerberg, 2020 Cohort

Nathan Yungerberg is a storyteller and Afrosurrealist who writes for TV, scripted podcasts, and theater. Nathan is a freelance writer for Sesame Street and head writer for Live from Mount Olympus a podcast co-directed by Tony award-winner Rachel Chavkin. He also worked as script editor for Cultureverse, a podcast on TRAX by PRX, narrated by Yara Shahidi and Kelly Marie Tran. Nathan’s plays have been developed or featured by The Cherry Lane Theatre, JAG Productions, LAByrinth Theater, The National Black Theatre, Alliance Theatre, The Fire This Time Festival, 48 Hours in Harlem, Blackboard, The Brooklyn Generator, The Lark, Roundabout Theatre Company, The Playwrights’ Center, American Blues Theater, Crowded Fire Theater, Climate Change Theatre Action, Northern Stage and The Bushwick Starr. He was commissioned by The New Black Fest for HANDS UP: 7 Playwrights, 7 Testaments, published by Concord Theatricals and adapted by BBC radio afternoon drama. Nathan’s play Esai’s Table was featured in The Cherry Lane Theatre’s Mentor Project (Mentored by Stephen Adly Guirgis and directed by Danya Taymor). Highlights: 2021-2024 Playwrights’ Center Core Writer, 2021-2022 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, 2021 National Black Theatre of Harlem I AM SOUL residency, Blue Ink Playwriting Award (Finalist), and a 2019 Djerassi Resident Artist. nathanyungerberg.com

Legacy

Celebrating the playwights that have participated in our residency program.

2020 Cohort

• Fedna Jacquet (Black Mother Lost Daughter)

2019 Cohort

• TyLie Shider (The Gospel Woman)

2018 Cohort

• Tracey Conyer Lee (Retreat)

• Darrel Alejandro Holnes (Bayano)

2017 Cohort

• Eric Micha Holmes  (Mondo Tragic)

• Lee Edward Colston II (The First Deep Breath)

2016 Cohort

• Derek Lee McPhatter (Serious Adverse Effects)

• Angelica Chéri (Crowndation: I Will Not Lie To David)

2015 Cohort

• Nambi E. Kelley (Blood)

• Dennis A. Allen II (Manhood)

2014 Cohort

• Aurin Squire (Zoohouse)

2013 Cohort

• Mfoniso Udofia (Her Portmanteau)