Awards
Zola Dee Wins 2025 Kesselring Prize for Playwriting
The [Home] going playwright will receive $25,000 and a two-week residency at the historic clubhouse of The National Arts Club.
April 16, 2026 By Meg Masseron
Zola Dee has been named winner of the 2025 Kesselring Prize for Playwriting. The [Home] going playwright will be honored in a May 18 ceremony held at New York City's National Arts Club (15 Gramercy Park South).
Dee will receive $25,000 and a two-week residency at the historic clubhouse of The National Arts Club. Dee was honored for her work as a playwright, screenwriter, and performer delving deeply into the complexities of home and displacement, Black Americana, African diasporic religions, queerness, and the imagining of freer worlds for the Black collective body. Her best known work, GUNSHOT MEDLEY: Part 1, was Ovation Award recommended and published in Routledge’s Contemporary Plays by Women of Color.
“Zola Dee's voice is uniquely of the moment and enduringly impactful. Her work confronts questions of home, displacement, belonging, and identity with striking clarity and creativity. The Kesselring Prize exists to recognize artists who are both shaping the present of theatre and redefining its future, and Zola Dee does exactly that,” said Concetta Bencivenga, NAC’s executive director, in a statement.
Dee's plays have been seen or developed with The National Black Theatre of Harlem, Skylight Theater, East West Players, Red Eye Theater, Rogue Machine Theater, Collaborative Artists Bloc, Hi-Arts, CalArts Center for New Performance, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, The Playwrights’ Center, and Antaeus Theatre Company. Her works include: [Home] going, Smile, Goddamnit, Smile; Rain, River, Ocean; On Freeing Fire, and Father, Father. She is currently a Jerome Hill Fellow in Theater, Performance, and Spoken Word; and one of the I AM Soul National Black Theater of Harlem resident playwrights.
"To be recognized among the phenomenal writers who have come before me is a profound honor. An honor that feels especially grounding amidst the current weight and shift of the world. This play, while containing multitudes, is centered around the pursuit of hope and the beauty of those who actively choose to dream into existence a better world for us all. I want to thank The Kesselring jury, along with National Black Theatre, Ava Novak, James Craven, my parents, and the ancestors for supporting me in sharing this work with the world,” said Dee in a statement.
For more information, visit NACNYC.org.
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