The People’s Theatre Reveals 2026 Playwrights Unit Cohort
The New Horizons Play Reading Festival will mark the program's debut at the Centro Cultural Inmigrante in Inwood.
The People's Theatre has announced the selection of three exceptional playwrights for its 2026 Playwrights Unit: Jaya S. Basu, Isabelle Fereshteh Sanatdar Stevens, and Andrew Aaron Valdez. Now in its third year since the program's relaunch, the Playwrights Unit continues to provide a platform for emerging and mid-career writers to develop new full-length plays that center the voices and experiences of immigrant, Latine, Black, and Queer communities. Each playwright will receive a $1,600 award.
The Playwrights Unit offers a robust creative process from August through December, including bi-weekly workshops, readings, and professional development sessions. Each playwright will receive individualized mentorship from The People's Theatre's Literary Manager, Marco Antonio Rodriguez, and artistic support from returning 2024 and 2025 Unit members Montserrat Méndez and Alyssa Haddad-Chin, who join this year as mentors.
The program will culminate with the New Horizons Play Reading Festival, presenting the playwrights' original plays over three consecutive evenings in December 2026. For the first time, the festival will take place at The People's Theatre: Centro Cultural Inmigrante, our new permanent home in Inwood, marking an exciting new chapter for the Playwrights Unit and bringing these new works directly to our Uptown community.
Executive Artistic Director Mino Lora shared her excitement about this year's cohort:
"The diversity of stories and experiences represented in this year's submissions was truly moving. We are so proud to support these three artists and look forward to the magic they will create in our space this season."
Literary Manager and mentor Marco Antonio Rodriguez also expressed his excitement and reflected on the selection process:
'This year's selection process was both exciting and incredibly challenging, with an exceptionally strong response from playwrights eager to develop new work with The People's Theatre. The submissions represented a remarkable range of voices, ideas, and works in progress. We spent a great deal of time reading, discussing, and sitting with the work before arriving at our three selections. Jaya S. Basu, Isabelle Sanatdar Stevens, and Andrew Aaron Valdez each brought something that immediately made us want to know more, not only about the plays they are writing but also where those plays could go with time, rigorous feedback, and a community of artists invested in their development. I'm thrilled to welcome these three playwrights into The People's Theatre Playwrights Unit this year, and as their mentor, I'm especially excited to get into the room with them and see what we can discover together.'
The 2026 Playwrights Unit Reading Festival will serve as both a culmination and celebration of the work developed during the program. Audiences are invited to engage with these powerful new plays, which reflect a shared commitment to justice, imagination, and collective transformation.
Meet the 2026 Playwrights Unit Members:
Jaya S. Basu is an Indian American multidisciplinary artist based near Washington, D.C. They are a playwright, poet, director, designer, dramaturg, actor, composer, lyricist, fiber artist, and sewist. They graduated from Washington College with a double major in English and Theatre in 2026. Recent playwriting credits include MAHAMOHA at the T4T4T Festival, Klecksography 2025 at Rorschach Theatre, and the Cellunova workshop reading series. They have also designed costumes for Theatre Prometheus and assistant directed at Delaware Shakespeare as the directing apprentice. You can find them on Instagram @jayasbasu and at jayasbasu.com.
Isabelle Fereshteh Sanatdar Stevens is an Iranian and Irish American writer, performer, and artist whose work aims to center the stories of her communities-often holding love and loss, the daringness to create new worlds and realities, and the act of bearing witness. Her plays have been the recipients of the National Student Playwriting Award, the Darrell Ayers National Playwriting Award, and the John Cauble National Playwriting Award from the Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival. She has been an artist-in-residence with Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, the Eugene O'Neill NPC, and New Rep Theatre Company. She is also a very proud board and community member of Olneyville, Rhode Island-based youth arts/playwriting nonprofit Proyecto Manton Ave/Manton Avenue Project (MAP), and the current Associate Artistic Director of New York Stage and Film. She holds an MFA from BU/BPT. isabellefereshteh.com
Andrew Aaron Valdez is a Mexican American, Coahuiltecan, and Indigenous Mexican playwright, poet, and arts worker whose practice centers Indigenous and Latine memory, cultural reclamation, and ritual as tools for performance and transformation. Andrew creates work that braids ancestral research with contemporary theatrical forms. His Xinatchli pedagogy, rooted in the Coahuiltecan-Nahuatl concept of a seed breaking open to grow, guides his approach to storytelling, community engagement, and healing. His plays have been supported by the Latinx Playwrights Circle, Yale Cabaret, Teatro Vivo, the Orchard Project, the Workshop Theatre, PlayPenn, the Playwrights Center, Cleveland Public Theatre, and The People's Theatre. His poetry and piñata sculptures draw from ongoing research in archives across the U.S., where ancestral memory is being held captive. He is a graduate of the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and a certified Intimacy Director with IDC.
For more information on The People's Theatre, visit www.thepeoplestheatre.org.
