Zola Dee Wins 2025 National Arts Club Kesselring Prize For Playwriting

The National Arts Club has announced that its 2025 Kesselring Prize for Playwriting has been awarded to Zola Dee, who was nominated by the National Black Theatre of Harlem for her play [Home] going. As the Kesselring Prize winner, Zola Dee will receive $25,000 plus the opportunity to develop her work and reside for two weeks in the historic landmark Tilden Mansion, the home of the National Arts Club. The award ceremony will take place on Monday, May 18, at 7:00 p.m. at the National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, New York City.

Concetta Bencivenga, the NAC's Executive Director, says, “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 theater and redefining its future, and Zola Dee does exactly that.”

Dee adds, “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.”

“Zola's work is remarkably moving, standing out among the many exceptional nominated playwrights for its emotional depth and imaginative scope,” says Inge Ivchenko, co-chair of the Kesselring committee. “[Home] going is a powerful and needed contribution to theater, and we are not only proud to recognize her work with the Kesselring Prize, but we also hope it propels Zola's already very promising career. It is such an honor being exposed to so much talent, and we want to thank everyone who submitted plays this year.”

As a playwright, screenwriter, and performer, Zola weaves stories that delve deeply into the complexities of home & displacement, Black Americana, African diasporic religions, queerness, and the imagining of freer worlds for the Black collective body. Her most notable work, GUNSHOT MEDLEY: Part 1, was Ovation Award recommended and published in Routledge's Contemporary Plays by Women of Color.

Her plays have been seen and/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 plays include: [Home] going; Smile, Goddamnit, Smile; Rain, River, Ocean; On Freeing Fire and Father, Father. Beyond the stage, Dee's creative vision extends to the screen, where she is developing works for film & television. Among her works in development are Lola, Lowlands, and an untitled film inspired by the eclectic personalities and raw energy of her time in Berlin.

She is currently a 2025 - 2028 Jerome Hill Fellow in Theater, Performance, and Spoken Word and one of the I AM Soul National Black Theater of Harlem resident playwrights. Other accomplishments include: Playwrights' Center's Jerome Fellow 2022-2023 & Many Voices Fellow 2021-2022, CTG Writer's Workshop 2019-2020, 2017-2018 Core Apprentice at The Playwrights' Center, 2018 Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights Diversity Fellow, and the CalArts R&P Black American Dialects Fellow. Currently, she serves as a Program Officer at the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council in the Twin Cities.

[Home] going is about a twelve-year-old girl named Presence who is on a quest to break a generational curse. For as long as she can remember, “the sadness" has plagued her family, culminating in her mother's latest mental breakdown after the forced sale of their ancestral home on the Carolina Sea Islands. Believing the answers to “the sadness” lie in the past, Presence escapes into the dreamworld, a fluid realm where time and space dissolve. Through this dream-state, Presence journeys back to Reconstruction-era South Carolina to confront her forefather, Ernest, and untangle the history currently unraveling her mother.

ABOUT THE KESSELRING PRIZE

The Kesselring Prize for Playwriting was established at the National Arts Club in 1980 by Charlotte Kesselring, widow of the playwright Joseph Kesselring, who is best known for Arsenic and Old Lace, to honor and support emerging playwrights with an honorarium and indirect support towards development of their work. Past recipients include notables in contemporary theater, such as Pulitzer Prize winners James Ijames and Tony Kushner, Pulitzer Prize nominee Rajiv Joseph, and recently Charles Smith and Aleshea Harris.

The Kesselring Prize Jury consists of 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis, whose new Broadway play Dog Day Afternoon opened at the end of March; Sonia Fernandez, the Dramaturg and Director of New Work at the Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in Washington, D.C.; and playwright Ralph B. Peña, a founding member and the producing artistic director of Ma-Yi Theater Company.

ABOUT THE NATIONAL ARTS CLUB

Founded in 1898, the National Arts Club is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with a mission to stimulate, foster, and promote public interest in the arts and to educate people in the fine arts. The Club offers more than 150 free programs to the public each year, including exhibitions, theatrical and musical performances, and lectures and readings, attracting over 25,000 visitors annually from New York City and beyond. Featured programs focus on all disciplines of the arts. For a full list of events or to learn more, please visit nacnyc.org.