2025 new play competition winners

1st place: deepfake by alisa Zhulina

Alisa Zhulina is a New York-based playwright. Her plays include Algorithm (finalist for the Blue Ink Playwriting Award; produced by Floor Five Theatre Company as audio drama), Killjoy (Exquisite Corpse Company), Riptide (New Perspectives Theatre), and Sublet (New Perspectives Theatre). She teaches in the Drama Department at New York University Tisch School of the Arts and is the author of Theater of Capital (Northwestern University Press, 2024).

2nd place: Housekeeping by jeremiah oc jahi

Jeremiah OC Jahi is an Atlanta-born, but Brooklyn-nurtured Black American playwright and creative who is currently based in Los Angeles. He is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. Jeremiah graduated cum laude with undergraduate and graduate degrees from The City University of New York, holding majors in Africana Studies, Theater, Political Science, and Sociology. Jeremiah has studied creative writing at Fordham University as a part of their writing program for Veterans. From January 2022 to May 2025, Jeremiah completed twelve AA degrees at Los Angeles Valley College in various subjects, further developing his creative skills as a writer, photographer, and filmmaker. He has won numerous film festival awards for his work as an actor, photographer, and filmmaker.

He is an alumni fellow of the year-long WGA WRITERS GUILD FOUNDATION: Veterans Writers Project Program in Film and Television, Veterans Make Movies fellowship at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Golden Globes Foundation fellowship, and the Geffen Playhouse eight-week Veterans Writing and Performance Workshop for theatre artists.

As a trained theater actor, he has performed on various stages across the country, including Gloucester Stage, Atlantic Theater Company, the Geffen Playhouse, and on a national tour of the Tyler Perry play Woman Thou Art Loosed.

Writing Accomplishments: 

2025 Stowe Story Labs Fellowship Semi-finalist for the pilot script Hood Therapy. 

2021 Best Full Length Play (The Two of Us) Finalist, 2021 by Savage Wonder Theater in New York.

2020 Bridge Award Finalist for Best Full-Length Play (The Two of Us) for the ARTS IN THE ARMED FORCES in Playwriting.

3rd place: vanessa the miracle girl by maddie dennis-yates

Maddie is a playwright (MFA Hunter College, 2025) whose work has been commissioned, developed, and/or produced by Fresh Ground Pepper, Workshop Theater, Art House Productions, Stagefemmes at Kenyon College, the Emerging Professional Residents at Milwaukee Repertory Theater, Women's Weekend Film Challenge, the Source Festival, and others. Recent recognition: finalist, Playwrights Horizons Unplugged production, finalist, Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference, semifinalist, Playwrights Foundation's Bay Area Playwrights Festival, semifinalist, Rattlestick’s Terrance McNally Incubator, finalist, Breaking & Entering reading series, finalist, EST/Youngblood cohort.