St. Louis Based Theater Artist JOAN LIPKIN is Awarded The Margo Jones Medal

In ceremonies held Sunday at the Missouri History Museum, artist, theater creator, and social activist Joan Lipkin was presented with the Margo Jones Medal. Lipkin has received international acclaim for her work creating projects that explore democracy, climate change, disability, LBGTQ+ experiences, voting rights, racial injustice, reproductive rights and more.

Lipkin says, “I am deeply honored to receive the Margo Jones Medal, named for the visionary trailblazer who directed and produced so many significant plays including Inherit the Wind which has transformed our culture.”

Margo Jones launched the American regional theater movement and the theater-in-the-round concept. She opened the first professional regional theater company, Theatre ‘47, in Dallas, Texas. Jones produced, directed, or staged 85 plays while in Dallas, 57 of those plays were new works. She played a critical role in the careers of many playwrights, including Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Joseph Hayes, Jerome Lawrence, and Robert E. Lee. Many of the plays she produced went on to become full-length motion pictures and/or filmed for television.

This is the first time since its inception in 1961 that a St. Louisan has been awarded the Margo Jones Medal. It is an honor not lost on Lipkin who said that she is grateful the selection committee acknowledged the theatrical contributions and legacy of St. Louis.

Annually, the Margo Jones Medal “honors a citizen-of-the-theater who has demonstrated a significant impact, understanding, and affirmation of the craft of playwriting, with a lifetime commitment to the encouragement of the Living Theatre everywhere.” The medal, endowed by the Lawrence and Lee families, is administered by the Lawrence and Lee Theatre Research Institute at The Ohio State University. Other previous honorees have included theatrical caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, New York Shakespeare Festival and Public Theatre founder Joseph Papp, White Barn Playhouse founder Lucille Lortel, National Chairman for the Arts’ Jane Alexander, Pulitzer Prize Winning Playwright Paula Vogel, and Washington Post critic Richard Coe.

The committee selected Lipkin for her innovative programs that extend theatre beyond traditional stages. She has helped train students and launch a student-run social justice theatre program, the Mosaic Theatre Company, at Auburn University. She developed Kaleidoscope, an original scripted program at Yale University that ran over three years to welcome incoming upperclassmen and help them navigate expectations of college life.

She created a traveling performance project for the Foster & Adoptive Care Coalition of Greater St. Louis. It featured children and grandparents in the foster care system, ages four to seventy-five, which toured public spaces such as shopping centers to dispel myths about foster parenting and build community support.

She co-wrote, directed, and produced Some of My Best Friends Are…, widely recognized as Missouri’s first LGBTQ+ theatre piece, and followed it with notable projects including The Louies, As American As Apple Pie, The Big Fat LGBT Show, the AC/DC series, and The Briefs Festival of Short LGBTQ+ Plays.

She co-wrote He’s Having Her Baby, Missouri’s first reproductive-choice musical. Lipkin directed the regional tour of Words of Choice, and staged the dance theatre piece Becoming Emily, honoring Emily Lyons, the abortion clinic nurse injured in the 1998 Birmingham bombing.

Lipkin has been featured on network television, National Public Radio, the BBC, American Theatre, and the Associated Press. Included in her publications are Embodied Playwriting: Improv and Acting Exercises for Writing and Devising, The Future Is Not Fixed: Short Plays Envisioning a Global Green New Deal, Scenes from a Diverse World, Immigrant Voices in the Pandemic, Best American Short Plays, Upstaging Big Daddy: Directing as if Race and Gender Matter, Radical Acts: Theater and Feminist Pedagogies of Change, and numerous articles in journals including HowlRound, Theatre Topics, New Theatre Quarterly, TDR: The Drama Review, and The Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies.

Her work has been recognized with numerous honors, including the St. Louis Theater Circle Lifetime Achievement Award; ATHE’s Leadership for Community-Based Theatre and Civic Engagement Award; the Visionary, Luminary, Bravely, Orfeos & Thalia; the Sister Lucy Ruth Rawe Disability Activism Award; Ethical Humanist of the Year; and Woman of Achievement. She is featured in Key Figures in Queer US Theatre and was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre in 2025.

Joan Lipkin is the founder and the producing artistic director of That Uppity Theatre Company in Company in St. Louis. Last fall, she directed the transgender opera As One at Union Avenue Opera in St. Louis. She received rave reviews for her first effort directing an Opera. Broadway World said she handled the staging with “grace, gentleness, and a genuine reflective sense of humor.”

Lipkin remains active in the world theatre scene, traversing the globe to further her efforts as an artist, creator, producer, director, and social activist. According to The Ohio State University Libraries website, she is the 56th recipient of the prestigious Margo Jones Medal. Visit library.osu.edu to learn more about the Margo Jones award.

Need more St. Louis Theatre News in your life?
Sign up for all the news on the Summer season, discounts & more...