Parity Development Award

Parity Development Award is sponsored by Parity Productions. Awards given to one woman (cis or trans) and one trans, gender-expansive, or intersex playwright, including developmental support for their play.

The Annual Parity Development Award – Parity Productions The Annual Parity Commission CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR 2025 PARITY DEVELOPMENT AWARD WINNERS: MONET HURST-MENDOZA AND DOM MARTELLO Applications for the 2026 Parity Development Award will open on Monday, February 16th at 12:00 pm EST!

Each year Parity presents two Development Awards, one to a woman (cis or trans) and one to a trans, gender-expansive, or intersex playwright who have both demonstrated a dedication to the craft of playwriting and a singular talent for storytelling and whose work is in harmony with our artistic mission.

The selected playwrights receive $2,500 each and extensive developmental support for their play, including one “closed door” reading with the Parity team, and at least one public reading, with an option for Parity to produce the awarded work.

ELIGIBILITY, APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS & FAQS Visit our APPLY FOR THE PARITY DEVELOPMENT AWARD page for additional information regarding eligibility, application requirements, and frequently asked questions. We believe the next great play can come from anywhere; we read all eligible applications and make no judgments based on a playwright’s education or age.

Applications for the 2026 Parity Development Award will open on February 16th, 2026 at 12:00 pm EST. In order to apply, please make sure to have a free profile on The Parity Database. To create or update your profile, click here .

Any questions regarding the Parity Development Award? Meet our Parity Development Award (formerly Commission) Winners The winners of our 2025 Annual Parity Development Award Monet Hurst-Mendoza is an NYC-based playwright and TV writer originally from Los Angeles. In 2025, she received the Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting and a NYSCA grant for her play cycle about working-class women in Yucatán.

Monet was a writer/producer for "Law & Order: SVU" and is a member of The Kilroys, Dramatist Guild, and WGAE. Dom Martello ’s work has been developed with Breaking the Binary, The Road Theater, The Workshop Theater, and The Elif Collective. Dom is a Celebration Theater Rites of Passage Commission Recipient with their play substantiation.

Their play RED TIDE was the inaugural reading for the Blue Roses Project (produced by James McBride & Gideon Glick). Dom is a Truman Capote Fellow and a Brooklyn College MFA Playwriting ‘27 Candidate. The winners of our 2024 Annual Parity Development Award Paloma Monfiletto (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based playwright and essayist.

She is currently in residence as a FIFE Fellow with the Bechdel Project. Her play, My Mother the Sun, was commissioned as part of the Echo Theatre Young Playwrights Lab, performed in reading at Premiere Stages, and was a finalist for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival in 2021 and 2023. Mallory Jane Weiss (she/her) grew up in New Jersey & writes plays in Brooklyn.

Her plays have been developed at Clubbed Thumb, Portland Stage Company, the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference (2022; finalist 2021 & 2023), Great Plains Theatre Conference, Playing on Air, and the Sam French Off-Off Broadway Festival. Mallory is a 2024 MacDowell Fellow. B.

A. : Harvard University, M. F.

A. : The New School.

The winners of our 2023 Annual Parity Development Award Cayenne Douglass’ (select) credits and development opportunities include Ensemble Studio Theatre (One Act Marathon 2019, Sloan Project Commission 2023), Theatre Masters (Take Ten 2020, Visionary Playwright Award 2022) Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, Fresh Ink, New Perspectives, Company One Theatre, Exquisite Corpse Company, Letter of Marque, Dixon Place, The Tank, Tofte Lake, The Kennedy Center and BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop.

Cayenne has been published by Concord Theatricals and was recently awarded the NYC Women’s Fund/NYFA grant to produce her play, Maiden Voyage which will be mounted in NYC 2024. MFA in Playwriting, Boston University. Website: www.

cayennedouglass. com IG: bruteful_theatre. Reid Pope is a comedian, playwright, and Jew who’s been featured in Vulture, PAPER, and Boys With Plants Magazine.

They were a finalist for the 2023 Terrence McNally Incubator and have developed plays with Jewish Plays Project, Normal Ave, Primetime Theatre, The 24 Hour Plays: Nationals, and Edinburgh Fringe. Their television pilot Old Queens won the 2023 ATX TV Festival Pitch Competition and they were named a 2022 New York Comedy Festival Content Creator To Watch. Reid is a New Georges Affiliated artist.

B. A. Brown | M.

F. A. NYU Tisch The winners of our 2022 Annual Parity Development Award Sam Mueller is a Chicago-born, Florida-raised, New York-based playwright.

Their work primarily explores queer bodies, public spaces, and the search for safety and security to live as one's authentic self. Their plays include Laced (2022 Princess Grace Semifinalist, 2020 Kilroys List, 2019 O’Neill Finalist), 70. 3 (2020 Hearth Theater Commission), and LYS (2021 WMU Commission).

They find a deep joy in working with students; their work has been read at Northwestern University, Columbia College Chicago, University of Central Florida, Western Michigan University, and University of Dayton. Sam is a proud member of Youngblood at Ensemble Studio Theatre. The plays (and Sam) are all very queer.

BS: Northwestern University Jordan Ramirez Puckett is a Latine writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Jordan’s plays include En Las Sombras, To Saints and Stars, A Driving Beat, Las Pajaritas, Restore, and Inevitable.

These works have been produced and/or developed by Abingdon Theatre Company (New York, NY), Creede Repertory Theatre, Goodman Theatre (Chicago, IL), Harold Clurman Laboratory Theatre Company (New York, NY), Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival, Playwrights Foundation (San Francisco, CA), Playwrights Realm (New York, NY), San Diego Repertory Theatre, San Francisco Playhouse, among others.

Jordan is currently attending the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at Juilliard. The winners of our 2021 Annual Parity Development Award M Sloth Levine (they/them/theirs) is a playwright, director, and designer. Their plays are sour gummy worms, sharp and sticky sweet.

They write for gothic dollhouses, for costume trunks full of rubber masks and elastic tutus. These plays are made of velvet, petrified wood, slime, celluloid, gold leaf, weed, gelatin, and citric acid.

The winners of our 2020 Annual Parity Development Award The winners of our 2019 Annual Parity Development Award Shualee Cook (she/her) has been writing theatre in the Midwest for so long that she’s starting to forget how to speak Californian. She has been a resident playwright at Tesseract Theatre in Saint Louis, and Stage Left Theatre in Chicago.

Plays in performance and development include Earworm , Cercle Hermaphroditos , An Invitation Out , Sunset Artists of the American West , Tempest In A Teapot , Osgood Rex , The Geography of Nowhere , and Music of the Goddess .

The winners of our 2018 Annual Parity Development Award Liz Kerin (she/her) A graduate of the Dramatic Writing Department at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Liz has a background in screenwriting as well as live theatre. Last year, her full-length play Stop-Motion was selected for the Botanicum Seedlings development workshop at Theatricum Botanicum and was also shortlisted as a semi-finalist at Premiere Stages. Azure D.

Osborne-Lee (he/him, they/them) is an award-winning Black queer theatre maker whose work has been produced and/or developed by Parity Productions, Trans Lab @ The Public and WP, The Tank, The Flea Theater, BAX|Brooklyn Arts Exchange, BAM, JACK, Rising Circle Theater Collective...

The winners of our 2017 Annual Parity Development Award Mêlisa Annis (she/her) As a playwright, her plays have been developed at The Lark and Dorset Theater Festival at the Theresa Rebeck Writers Colony, The New School, Primary Stages' ESPA*Drills, The National Arts Club NYC, The Playground Experiment, and RAL.

Mêlisa was a finalist for the High Tide New Playwriting Prize (2015), the Lark's Playwrights Week (2015) and she was the recipient of the Fordham Summer Fellowship while studying for her MFA in playwriting at Fordham/Primary Stages. ​ Else C.

Went (they/them) is a non-binary playwright whose work has been developed by The Public, WP, Playwrights Realm, Parity Productions, The Tank, The Flea, The Brick, Florida Studio Theatre, ISC Santa Fe, Barn Arts Collective, and others. Else is a founding member of The Renovationists, a former Playwrights Realm Writing Fellow, and an alum of Trans Theatre Lab @ WP and The Public.

In accordance with New York State Law, the New York State Office of the Attorney General requires that the website and telephone number for the Attorney General’s Charities Bureau be included on all solicitations. They are as follows: https://www. charitiesnys.

com / Phone: (212) 416-8401. A copy of Parity Productions' (EIN 13-4043424) latest annual report may be obtained, upon request, from the organization or from the New York State Attorney General’s Charities Bureau, 28 Liberty Street, 15th Floor, New York, New York 10005.