2025 new play competition winners

1st place: deepfake

by alisa Zhulina

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.

Alisa Zhulina is a New York-based playwright. Her 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).

2nd place: Housekeeping

by jeremiah oc jahi

A tight-knit hotel housekeeping crew has been relocated to a new hotel in a recently opened sports entertainment complex bordering the all Black southwest Atlanta and the downtown business district. Already grappling with the change of location and its demands on professionalism, workplace relationships, politics, and personal demons, several mysterious falls by staff and guests grip the complex, threatening to halt operations. Housekeeping is tasked by its ambitious supervisor to make sure the falls are not happening due to a lack of them doing their jobs to keep the hotel clean. When a new employee is hired and the falls intensify, relationships continue to strain until the new employee ushers in the solution to the mysterious falls.

Jeremiah OC Jahi is an Atlanta-born, but Brooklyn-nurtured Black American playwright and creative who is currently based in Los Angeles. A  veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, Jeremiah graduated cum laude with undergraduate and graduate degrees from The 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 Writers Project Program in Film and Television, 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 theatre artists.

As an actor, he has performed across the country, including Gloucester Stage, Atlantic Theater Company, the Geffen Playhouse, and on the national tour of the Tyler Perry play Woman Thou Art Loosed.

3rd place: vanessa the miracle girl

by maddie dennis-yates

When Vanessa, 14, Italian, sees the David on a field trip, she has an immediate sexual/artistic awakening – just as an earthquake hits, killing all of 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.