Rattlestick Theater Reveals 2023-2024 Van Lier New Voices Fellows

Rattlestick Theater announced that it will host playwrights AriDy Nox and a.k. payne as its 2023-24 Van Lier New Voices Fellows. This program provides substantial support to two playwrights of color under 30 annually, including a $35,000 living stipend, a $5,000 artistic fund, mentorship with a chosen mentor playwright, workshops and readings of new work, as well as participation in Rattlestick's larger artistic network. The Van Lier New Voices Fellowship is funded by New York Community Trust and the Jerome Foundation.

“The Van Lier New Voices Fellowship provides pivotal support to early career playwrights by encouraging experimentation and providing a foundational artistic home as the fellows navigate the early stages of their careers.  The incoming Fellows are powerful inventive writers with real vision for what the future of the form could be. I'm honored to support a.k. and AriDy and grateful that in my first year as Rattlestick's artistic director, I have the opportunity to amplify their work.” - Will Davis, Artistic Director, Rattlestick Theater

AriDy Nox is a multi-disciplinary black femme storyteller and social activist with a variety of forward-thinking creative works under her/their belt including the historical reimagining of the life of Sally Hemmings BLACK GIRL IN PARIS (2020), the ancestral reckoning play A WALLESS CHURCH (2019), the afrofuturist ecopocalypse musical METROPOLIS (2019), and many others. AriDy creates out of the vehement belief that creating a future in which marginalized peoples are free requires a radical imagination. Their tales are offerings intended to function as small parts of an ancient, expansive, awe-inspiring tradition of world-shaping, created by and for black femmes.  As a graduate of the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at Tisch School of the Performing Arts at NYU and a beneficiary of the Musical Theatre Factory Inaugural MAKERS cohort, the Emerging Writer's Group at The Public Theatre, The Civilians' Research and Development Group, Horizon Theatre's Black Women Speak Cohort, and the Live and In Color June Bingham commission, they have been inordinately privileged to share the workings of her imagination among a vast array of inspiring and supportive artists of various radical backgrounds throughout the country.

a.k. payne (she/they) is a playwright and theatermaker with roots in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her plays love on and engage Black lives and languages beyond the confines of linear time to find/remember stories that might create conditions for our collective liberation(s). They hold a B.A. in English and African-American Studies from Yale College and an MFA in Playwriting under Tarell Alvin McCraney from fka Yale School of Drama. Their work has been a finalist for the L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. They are a grandchild of the Great Migration; a queer & non-binary abolitionist affected in community by the 'New Jim Crow;” and of a great lineage of Black women storytellers and living-room archivists; all of which deeply informs, uplifts and amplifies their work as a playwright, community organizer and spacemaker. 
Rehomed in Spring 2022 from the Lark Play Development Center, The Van Lier New Voices Fellowship program will be overseen by Artistic Director Will Davis. Since 2011, the Fellowship has supported sixteen playwrights including Susan Soon He Stanton, Reginald Douglas, Christopher Oscar Peña, Anna  Moench, Donja R. Love, C.A. Johnson, Christina Quintana, Brittany Allen, David Zheng, Erika Dickerson-Despenza, Xavier Galva, Ife Olujobi, Edison Ventura Mata Diaz, Zora Howard, and outgoing 2022-23 fellows May Treuhaft-Ali, and Minghao Tu.  These extraordinary playwrights have produced and presented dozens of works to thousands of audience members both regionally and throughout New York City, with many of these aforementioned fellows garnering Peabody, WGA, Princess Grace Awards, Pulitzer Prizes for Drama Finalists, and Susan Smith Blackburn Special Commendations.  

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