Echo Theater Company Reveals Winners of 2025 New Play Competition
Winners include Alisa Zhulina's Deepfake, Jeremiah OC Jahi,'s Housekeeping, and Maddie Dennis-Yates' Vanessa The Miracle Girl.
The Echo Theater Company has revealed the winners of the company’s 2025 New Play Competition.
First Place
In first place, winning a $1000 cash prize plus travel and housing to attend rehearsals and a public reading at Atwater Village Theatre, is Alisa Zhulina with Deepfake. Set in a near-future where LNM (Lonely No More) sells lifelike companions, two new lovers, two old flames and a family collide—testing whether artificial intimacy can heal the very human wounds it exposes. Zhulina’s other 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).
Second Place
The second place prize of $500 and a rehearsed online reading goes to Jeremiah OC Jahi, an Atlanta-born, Brooklyn-nurtured, Black American playwright currently based in Los Angeles, for his play Housekeeping. In Housekeeping, a tight-knit cleaning crew has been relocated to a new hotel in a recently opened sports entertainment complex bordering all-Black southwest Atlanta and the downtown business district. The public is invited to join the online reading on Sunday, March 29 at 4 p.m., which will be directed by DeJuan Christopher and feature the talents of Channel Bell, Ben Cain, Jon Chaffin, Joy DeMichelle and Matt Elam. To request the viewing link, email theboxoffice@echotheatercompany. A veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, Jahi graduated cum laude with undergraduate and graduate degrees from City University of New York, holding majors in Africana Studies, Theater, Political Science and Sociology, and studied creative writing at Fordham University as a part of their writing program for Veterans. He is an alumni fellow of the year-long WGA Writers Guild Foundation Veterans Writing Project, 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 theater artists.
Third Place
Playwright Maddie Dennis-Yates is the recipient of the third place, $250 honorarium and a note session with members of the Echo’s artistic staff for her play Vanessa The Miracle Girl. When 14-year-old Vanessasees the David on a field trip, she has an immediate sexual/artistic awakening – just as an earthquake hits, killing all her classmates and her teacher. She becomes an instant tragedy celebrity, worshipped by the Italian press, mentored by the Pope – but what's next for the miracle girl? A spectacle-laden, art historical, gender-bending coming-of-age story, Vanessa is about the disrupted life of a person who barely got the chance to masturbate and make bad art. 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.
The 2025 New Play Competition prize committee included literary agent Beth Blickers, playwright Angelica Chéri (Berta, Berta), 59E59 Theaters artistic director Val Day, playwright and screenwriter Rick Cleveland (The West Wing, Six Feet Under, House of Cards, Archer, Legit, Nurse Jackie), playwright Jessica Goldberg (Babe, Body Politic), and former literary agent and current associate artistic director at The Playwrights Realm Alexis Williams.
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