Internationally acclaimed playwright, screenwriter, installation artist and MacArthur “genius grant” recipient Lynn Nottage will receive the 2025 International Humanities Prize from Washington University in St. Louis.
The biennial prize, awarded by WashU’s Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences, honors the lifetime work of a noted scholar, writer or artist who has made a significant and sustained contribution to the world of arts and letters.
“Lynn Nottage is a masterful storyteller of the human condition,” said Julia Walker, a professor of English and chair of the Performing Arts Department, both in Arts & Sciences. “While her plays address some of today’s most complex and difficult issues at the intersection of race, gender and labor relations, they also feature multidimensional characters who are immanently recognizable because their truths speak to our lives, too.”
Nottage will receive the Humanities Prize during a public ceremony April 16 in the Clark-Fox Forum of WashU’s Hillman Hall. Additional events and programming related to her visit will be announced in the coming months. The prize is accompanied by a $50,000 award — up from $25,000 in previous years.
“The International Humanities Prize recognizes the breadth and depth of a nominee’s contributions to the humanities,” said Stephanie Kirk, director of the Center for the Humanities. “Lynn Nottage is an accomplished dramatist who also has worked to bring the power of theater to new spaces and underserved communities. We could not be more thrilled to welcome her to campus.”
About Lynn Nottage
The first, and still only, woman to have twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Nottage was born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., by a family of nurses, teachers, activists and artists. As a student at Harlem’s Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art, she was selected — on the strength of her play “The Dark Side of Verona,” about Black actors staging Shakespeare in the American South — for a workshop mentored by Stephen Sondheim.
Nottage earned her bachelor’s degree in English and in African American studies from Brown University in 1986 and her master’s of fine arts in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama in 1989. While working as a press officer for Amnesty International, she contributed a short piece, “Ida Mae Cole Takes a Stance” to the 1992 musical revue “A… My Name is Still Alice.” The following year, her short play “Poof!”, about marriage and spontaneous combustion, debuted at the Actors Theater in Louisville, Ky.
Nottage’s first full-length play, “Crumbs from the Table of Joy,” was commissioned by New York’s Second Stage Theater in 1995. It was soon followed by “Por’Knockers” (1995), “Mud, River, Stone” (1997), “Las Meninas” (2002), “Intimate Apparel” (2003) and “Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine” (2004). In 2009, Nottage won her first Pulitzer for “Ruined,” which explores the aftermath of civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Nottage’s second Pulitzer came in 2017 for “Sweat,” which follows three friends in the fading industrial town of Reading, Pa., and which The New Yorker called “the first theatrical landmark of the Trump Era.” After its Broadway run, “Sweat” embarked on a National Mobile Unit Tour, traveling to small towns across the Midwest. Building on the two years of interviews she’d conducted for the play, Nottage also developed the 2017 performance installation “This is Reading” at the Reading Railroad Station.
Other plays include “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark” (2011), “One More River to Cross: A Verbatim Fugue” (2015), “Mlima’s Tale” (2018) and “Clydes” (2021). She also wrote the book for “MJ The Musical” (2021), featuring the music of Michael Jackson, and for “The Secret Life of Bees” (2021), a musical adaptation of the novel by Sue Monk Kidd.
Nottage was a writer and producer on the Netflix series “She’s Gotta Have It,” directed by Spike Lee, and a consulting producer on the third season of the Apple+ series “Dickinson.” She also co-founded Market Road Films, a production company where projects have included The New York Times op-doc “Takeover” (2021), the Peabody-nominated podcast “Unfinished: Deep South” (2020) and the documentaries “The Notorious Mr. Bout” (2014), “First to Fall” (2013) and “Remote Control” (2013).
In addition to her MacArthur Fellowship and Pulitzer Prizes, Nottage has received the National Black Theatre Fest’s August Wilson Playwriting Award, the Doris Duke Artist Award and grants and honors from the Academy of Arts and Letters, the Dramatists Guild, the Guggenheim Foundation, Jewish World Watch, PEN, the Steinberg Charitable Trust, Time magazine and the William Inge Festival. She is currently a professor of drama at the Columbia School of the Arts and an artist-in-residence at the Park Avenue Armory.
For more information about Nottage, visit lynnnottage.com. For more information about the International Humanities Prize, visit humanities.wustl.edu.
