The Actors Fund and Playwrights Horizons have awarded Leah Nanako Winkler the first-ever Mark O’Donnell Prize, a grant of up to $25,000 for a playwright, composer, director, or designer, named after the late humorist and playwright.
Winkler’s plays include Kentucky, which played an acclaimed Off-Broadway engagement at Ensemble Studio Theatre last year, and Two Mile Hollow, currently playing Chicago’s First Floor Theater. Both plays were featured on the Kilroys List (2015 and 2017).
The inaugural Mark O’Donnell Prize was awarded to the playwright at a ceremony at the newly named Mark O’Donnell Theater at The Actors Fund Arts Center in Brooklyn October 25.
In addition to the prize money, the award includes access to The Mark O’Donnell Theater to develop a reading of a new work, as well as counseling from The Actors Fund on how to apply for affordable housing and obtain health insurance.
Winkler is a 2017 Sundance Ucross Fellow, a 2016-2018 Time Warner Fellow at the Women's Project Lab, and a member of Ma Yi, EST and the Dorothy Streslin New American Writer's Group at Primary Stages.
Winkler’s plays also include Diversity Awareness Picnic, Death For Sydney Black, Thirty-Six, and God Said This, among others. Her work has been developed with Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, EST, The Flea, Second Stage, New Georges, and more.
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