Sophie Boyce and Veronica Mansour to Receive the 21st Annual Fred Ebb Award

The Fred Ebb Foundation will present the 21st annual Fred Ebb Award for aspiring musical theatre songwriters to the team of Sophie Boyce & Veronica Mansour. The award, named in honor of the late award-winning lyricist Fred Ebb, will be presented by Christopher Sieber on Monday December 1st from 6-8pm at a by-invitation-only ceremony at 54 Below.

The Fred Ebb Award recognizes excellence in musical theatre songwriting, by a songwriter or songwriting team that has not yet achieved significant commercial success. The award is meant to encourage and support aspiring songwriters to create new works for the musical theatre. The prize includes a $60,000 award. The Fred Ebb Foundation is funded by royalties from Mr. Ebb’s vast catalogue of work. Past winners include John Bucchino (2005); Steve Lutvak & Robert L. Freedman (2006); Peter Mills (2007); Adam Gwon(2008); Marcy Heisler & Zina Goldrich (2009); Douglas J. Cohen (2010); Jeff Blumenkrantz (2011); Sam Willmott (2012); Michael Kooman & Christopher Dimond (2013); Chris Miller & Nathan Tysen (2014); Stacey Luftig & Phillip Palmer (2015); Thomas Mizer & Curtis Moore (2016); Shaina Taub (2017); Will Reynolds & Eric Price (2018); Angela Sclafani and Benjamin Velez (2019); Ben Bonnema & Christopher Staskel and Michael R. Jackson (2020); Isabella Dawis & Tidtaya Sinutoke (2021); Julia Riew (2022); Freya Catrin Smith & Jack Williams (2023); and Cheeyang Ng & Eric Sorrels (2024).

The selection panel is comprised of Foundation Trustee Mitchell S. Bernard, actor Jonathan Burke, music director David Loud, and actor Maria-Christine Oliveras. Each year, the Foundation also makes a donation to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.

Sophie Boyce is a Lyricist and Librettist, originally from London, UK. She has most recently been honoured as a Dramatist Guild Fellow (2025), Richard Rodgers Award Winner (2025), Eric H. Weinberger Librettist Award Winner (2025), Eugene O’Neill NMTC Winner (2023) and Finalist for the Kleban Prize. Sophie has an MFA in Musical Theatre Writing from NYU and is alum of the BMI Bookwriters Workshop. Sophie was a member of the Writers Room for the UK’s BAFTA-Award-Winning TV series, “Skins” (Season 6). She is Founder and Director of the acclaimed UK Musical Theatre Program, Spirit YPC, which under her direction has attracted over 150 million viewers to their online performance videos. Sophie likes to write rhythmic, breakneck-paced stories that surprise and thrill, centering troublemakers, obsessives and/or women who refuse to shrink. She’s a fan of the audacious, the facetious and the morally ambiguous. www.sophieboyce.net

Veronica Mansour

is a composer, lyricist, and artist. She is a two-time Richard Rodgers Award winner, Jonathan Larson Grant winner, Eric H. Weinberger Librettist Award winner, Dramatists Guild Fellow, recent nominee for a Marvin Hamlisch International Music Award (Musical Theatre Composition), one of four writers selected for the DreamWorks Theatricals, MTI & NBCUniversal Emerging Writers Program (composer and co-lyricist for How to Train Your Dragon Jr.), and one of three 2023 Write Out Loud contest winners for her song “Runaway Girl” (written with abs wilson). Mansour’s work has been developed with the Lucille Lortel Theatre ('25), the National Alliance for Musical Theatre (NAMT Festival ’24), the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center (NMTC ’23, ’24), Rhinebeck Writers Retreat (’24), Goodspeed Musicals (Johnny Mercer Writers Grove, ’24), The Orchard Project (’25), New York Theatre Barn (New Works Series, ’23), the South Carolina New Play Festival (’24), Musical Theatre West (New Works Festival, ’24), Syracuse University (New Works Series, ’24), Manhattan School of Music, St. Olaf College, Millikin University, the University of Notre Dame, and more. Mansour is also an accomplished cellist and vocalist, having studied for many years at the Colburn School and the Pasadena Conservatory of Music. She is a proud member of Maestra, the Dramatists Guild, and BMI. She holds an MFA in Graduate Musical Theatre Writing from NYU Tisch School of the Arts.