Ensemble Studio Theatre and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to Award 2026 New Play Commissions

Ensemble Studio Theatre and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation have announced the 2026 Science and Technology Project New Play Commissions. For more than 25 years, the EST/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project has developed over 300 plays that challenge and broaden the view of science in the popular imagination.

The 2026 Sloan New Play Commission recipients and plays are:

• The Doves by Aditya Joshi
• Sidewalk Babies by Amy B Tiong
• The Kellogg Bros by Becca Schlossberg
• Moonshot by Daria Miyeko Marinelli
• The Ring Around Us by Dylan Guerra
• A Scratch, A Scratch by Julian Mesri
• DRIVE by Libby Carr
• Becoming Magnetic by Rachel Lin
• Vesuviana by Susan Yassky
• Glass Ark by Yide Cai

'These projects explore science throughout the centuries, grappling with urgently contemporary questions: about broader societal access to and understanding of scientific breakthroughs, about the role of money and media in scientific understanding and about how science can transform our personal lives and relationships. These extraordinary writers bring curiosity, wit and a healthy dose of irreverence to these fascinating stories,” said Program Director Linsay Firman.

“We are proud to support these promising new play commissions by ten talented playwrights who propose to dramatize scientific themes and characters in original new work,“ said Doron Weber, Vice President and Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, “The pathbreaking EST/Sloan partnership of more than two decades has resulted in a rich bounty of new plays that have been produced on major stages in the US and around the globe and transformed how we view both science and theater.”

2026 EST/SLOAN PROJECT NEW PLAY COMMISSIONS

The Doves by Aditya Joshi

In 1900, TJ Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker created The Doves Press to restore beauty to the mechanized process of book printing. Over a hundred years later, a curious designer tries to figure out how their creation ended up in the bottom of the Thames while recreating the iconic Doves typeface.

Aditya Joshi has written TV for Amazon and FX, co-wrote AT&T Untold Stories winner Minnesota Goodbye, and directed A West Side Story (Tribeca 2025). Recent honors include 2026 Page 73 Writers Group, 2026 Pregones/PRTT Step Up Residency and the 2025 WGA/Filmnation New York Screenwriting Fellowship. He was also the recipient of the 2025 Sloan Stories of Science Development Fund at SFFILM for his project “One Inch From Earth.”

Sidewalk Babies by Amy B Tiong

It's 1920 Coney Island, and for 25 cents, you can see Dr. Martin Couney's Incubator Babies: premature newborns in heated glass chambers. What looks like a sideshow is actually a lifeline. Couney and head nurse Annabelle saved over 6,500 infants, free of charge, funded entirely by a crowd's curiosity.

Amy B. Tiong is a Chicago-based Chinese-American playwright, screenwriter, and film director. A Gates Millennium Scholar, NYU Tisch Dean's Scholar, and Hansberry-Lilly Fellow, she holds an MFA from Northwestern. Her genre-bending work explores solidarity and generational healing.

The Kellogg Bros by Becca Schlossberg

Meet Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, a superstar American physician, leader of the beloved Battle Creek Sanitorium. (And there's also his brother, Will.) Together, their invention revolutionized the landscape of American medicine, diet, and nutrition. They also hated each other's guts. A story of love, family, and betrayal.

Becca Schlossberg is a Jewish, award-winning, non-binary, plant daddy/writer/performer. Plays include Dybbuk Bat Mitzvah (Jewish Plays Project Finalist), Whipping Boy, More, Discuss (Samuel French), The Untold Yippie Project (Samuel French), 3Boys (Original Works Publishing), Just Like I Wanted (Playscripts), Forever Friends (Playscripts) and many others.

Moonshot by Daria Miyeko Marinelli

Can you make the people around you believe in what you believe? MOONSHOT follows four generations of an aggressively STEM family as they debate ideas and fight to accelerate an idea from science fiction to climate intervention possibility. Come out, look at the moon, wiggle your toes in the wet grass, and try not to roll your eyes when I tell you something that's beyond your wildest comprehension.

Daria Miyeko Marinelli is the descendant of Japanese-American internees and Italian-American contadinos. They are a playwright, screenwriter, and climate activist who tells stories about renegades, belonging, and new frontiers. Mx. Marinelli has worked with Cirque du Soleil, La Jolla Playhouse's WOW Festival, The Playwrights Realm's Beyond the Realm, and is a recent winner of The Ollie Award.

The Ring Around Us by Dylan Guerra

The Ring Around Us is a kaleidoscopic depiction of the boundaries between emotion and disaster that chronicles the lead up and fallout from The Challenger disaster, starting with the control room and moving through the investigation. The play asks 'How do we move our lives forward when we are at the helm of catastrophic loss?'

Dylan Guerra is a NYC-based queer Latine writer/director. His play The Grief Eater Near North Bender is premiering with Roundabout & NYTW for the 26/27 season. Dylan has received the 2026 Weissberger/Harris Award, the Playwrights Horizons' Winegarten Commission, & MTC's Sloan Commission. He has been a member of writers groups at EST, Ars Nova, P73 and Clubbed Thumb.

A Scratch, A Scratch by Julian Mesri

1721. A smallpox epidemic devastates England. A society lady, her face scarred by the same illness, brings her child to a surgeon, to prove that a new technique, learned from women-only communities in Constantinople, could end this brutal disease. This punk rock opera tells the story of Mary Wortley Montagu, whose bravery helped pave the way for modern vaccination.

Julian Mesri is an Argentinean-American playwright and composer. Recent work includes bilingual musical adaptations of Much Ado About Nothing and Comedy of Errors (Public Theater), and Irrepressible Magic of the Tropics (Intar). He is currently the Judith Champion Musical Theater Launchpad Resident at Signature Theater. He previously received an EST/Sloan Commission for his musical Favaloro.

DRIVE by Libby Carr

Anja's struggling to treat her ignored perimenopause symptoms. Ray's being denied his testosterone prescription for gender-affirming care. There's a new healthcare startup in town specializing in female testosterone replacement therapy — so Anja and Ray team up to rob it. DRIVE is a heist comedy about politicized healthcare and medical misogyny.

Libby Carr is a writer and dance artist from Houston. Their plays Calf Scramble and Roadkill have been developed and produced with Playwrights Horizons, Ojai Playwrights Conference, the Ucross Foundation, the Kennedy Center, Ensemble Studio Theater, and more. Libby's a proud member of EST/Youngblood. BA: UT Austin.

Becoming Magnetic by Rachel Lin

Rhea can't seem to catch a break. She's been living paycheck to paycheck when she runs into a former classmate who's living her Best Life! Has Rhea heard of Becoming Magnetic, a proprietary manifestation process backed by neuroscience? For just $88.88 a month, she too can manifest! 'Becoming Magnetic' is a play about the commercialization of belief and what it costs to manifest our dreams.

Rachel Lin is an actor, writer, and filmmaker born in the UK, raised between New York City's Chinatowns. Her solo show Dear John at HERE Arts Center (March 2026), was 'a work of uncommon intimacy and sly ambition' and 'theatricality at its best,' according to critics. This June, her performance in the world premiere of I Wanttt a Unicorn Frappe!!! at the Tank was called 'a comedy-powerhouse turn.' She is an EST member artist, and New York Theater Workshop 2050 Fellow ('25-'26). BFA, NYU.

Vesuviana by Susan Yassky

Vesuviana follows a passionate archaeogeneticist on her single-minded quest to uncover the true history of Pompeii's famous plaster casts. When her findings prompt an online backlash, she discovers that replacing a decades-old narrative will require her to tell a new, more compelling story of her own.

Susan Yassky's plays include Jake (Ojai Playwrights Conference and O'Neill NPC finalist, Kilroys Web 2025), Manifestations (Ojai finalist, O'Neill NPC semi-finalist), and A Variation (Seven Devils Playwrights Conference semi-finalist). She is a proud former member of EST/Youngblood. Currently under commission at Playwrights Horizons. MFA: NYU. BA: Yale College.

Glass Ark by Yide Cai (蔡逸得)

On September 26, 1991, eight scientists sealed themselves inside Biosphere 2, a $150 million futuristic glass dome funded by billionaire Ed Ross. Designed as a self-sustaining miniature Earth, the experiment quickly devolved into chaos. Glass Ark explores this fascinating collision between scientific research, human ego, and media spectacle—a precursor of what is to come.

From Shenzhen, China, Yide Cai (蔡逸得) is a playwright, poet, and translator, now an MFA Playwriting candidate at Boston University. He is the translator of plays such as Dead Poet Society, and Rabbit Hole. As a fellow of the Laboratory for Global Performance & Politics, he is always chasing connections across distance.

ABOUT Ensemble Studio Theatre:

Ensemble Studio Theatre (Estefanía Fadul and Graeme Gillis, Co-Artistic Directors) is a Hell's Kitchen-based, Off-Broadway theatre focused on the development of new work and voices since its founding by Curt Dempster in 1968. For over 57 years, EST has developed thousands of new American plays and has grown into a company of over 600 actors, directors, playwrights, designers, and stage managers. EST's mission is to develop and produce original, provocative, and authentic new work. A dynamic community committed to a collaborative process, EST is dedicated to inclusion across all aspects of identity and perspective, including but not limited to race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, sexuality, physical or mental ability, physical or mental health, and recovery, while acknowledging and working to end systemic marginalization and oppression at all levels of its organization. EST discovers and nurtures new voices and supports artists throughout their creative lives. This extraordinary support and commitment to inclusivity are essential to yield extraordinary work.

THE EST/SLOAN PROJECT (Linsay Firman, Program Director), a pioneering collaboration between the Ensemble Studio Theatre and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is designed to stimulate artists to create credible and compelling new theatrical works that explore the worlds of science, technology, and economics and to challenge existing stereotypes of scientists and engineers in popular culture. Since its inception in 1998, the EST/Sloan Project has commissioned, developed, and produced over 300 staged plays involving over 1,000 playwrights, actors, choreographers, composers, and theatre companies nationwide. Recent notable plays include The Reservoir by Jake Brasch, You Met Jane Goodall and Her Mother? by Michael Walek, Las Borinqueñas by Nelson Diaz-Marcano, what you are now by Sam Chanse, Behind the Sheet by Charly Evon Simpson, Isaac's Eye by Lucas Hnath, Fast Company by Carla Ching and Photograph 51 by Anna Ziegler.

THE ALFRED P. SLOAN FOUNDATION (Doron Weber, Vice President and Program Director) is a New York–based, philanthropic, not-for-profit institution that makes grants for research in science, technology, and economics; quality and diversity of scientific institutions; and public engagement with science. Sloan's program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology, directed by Doron Weber, supports books, radio & podcasts, film, television, theater, new media, and YouTube & TikTok to reach a wide, non-specialized audience and to bridge the two cultures of science and the humanities. The Foundation has an active theater program and commissions about 20 science plays each year from the Ensemble Studio Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, and The National Theatre in London, while supporting select productions across the country and abroad. The Foundation's pioneering theater program began with a 1997 grant to Ensemble Studio Theatre for Arthur Giron's play about the Wright Brothers, Flight, and has helped usher in the science play as a regular part of the theater canon, making Sloan a coveted commission for any playwright engaging with a science and technology theme or character. Beginning with such renowned science plays as David Auburn's Proof, Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, and Alan Alda's QED, recent grants from Sloan's Theater Program have supported Jonathan Spector's Tony Award-winning play Eureka Day, Jake Brasch's The Reservoir, Michael Walek's Have You Met Jane Goodall and Her Mother?, Lloyd Suh's Franklinland, Nelson Diaz-Marcano's Las Borinqueñas, Mary Elizabeth Hamilton's Smart, Mark Rylance's Dr. Semmelweis, Anchuli Felicia King's Golden Shield, Sam Chanse's what you are now, Charly Evon Simpson's Behind the Sheet, Lucy Kirkwood's Mosquitoes, Chiara Atik's Bump, Nick Payne's Constellations, Lucas Hnath's Isaac's Eye, Anna Ziegler's Photograph 51, Leigh Fondakowski's Spill, and Bess Wohl's Continuity.

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