Admissions

Any playwright who resides in and has the legal right to work in the United States may apply for the 7-year residency at New Dramatists as long as they can meet the submission requirements of 2 full-length plays, a biography or resume, and a statement of intent. 

All resident playwrights are required to show documents for I-9 form verification; these documents will be reviewed (as necessary) throughout a writer’s seven-year residency.

Please note New Dramatists is not in the position to be a visa sponsor.

To Begin Your Application, visit this page: http://newdramatists.org/admissions and click the appropriate button to “Begin Application” for either a new user or return applicant. The buttons will become active at noon on August 15, 2023. You will be prompted to create an online account or to log into an existing account. You will be able to return to your saved application to continue working until you complete the final tab and click “Submit Your Application”, at which point you will no longer have access.

Follow the prompts to Confirm your Eligibility and Enter Your Contact Information.

Enter or Copy-and-Paste a Letter of Intent the equivalent length of up to but no longer than one page. The Letter of Intent is introduced at the final meeting. At this point in the process, both of your plays have been read by the entire committee, who are tasked with intuiting who you are as a writer through your work. The statement is an opportunity for them to hear directly from you. This is your opportunity to provide context for the plays you submitted, and to help the panelists understand what compels you to join New Dramatists’ playwright company.

Upload or Copy-and-Paste/Enter Your Current Playwright/Artistic Bio, Resume, or CV

Upload a Stand-Alone Title Page for each play that includes your full name and contact information in the document. Optional: you are welcome to include a brief summary of the play in this document to help panelists recall your work, after having read over 100 scripts.

Upload “Blind Copies” of Two Original Full-Length Works (Plays and/or Libretti-books of musicals) Each submission must be a single work that constitutes a full evening of theatre. For example, a 90-minute play without an intermission is a full-length work.

• Please do not put any identifying information in the script documents. Identifying information includes: your name, contact information, production/development histories, awards, your agent, special thanks, hyperlinks, actors/production team, etc.
• Please include a character list at the beginning of your script document.
• Every script page must be numbered.
• Every script page must include the play’s title.

Submit Application
Read and agree to our privacy policy. Click “Submit Your Application”. After you complete this step, you will no longer be able to make changes to your application. Once your application is submitted, you will receive an automatically-generated confirmation email. Your application is submitted by the deadline if you receive this confirmation email by 11:59pm EDT on August 29, 2023, or before the maximum of 350 applications is reached.

Supplemental Materials – You may submit music samples to accompany a libretto to showcase the style and tone of the larger work. Please do not submit music in place of the book, and please note past admissions committees have often found libretti less competitive than plays. Once you submit your completed application, you will receive a confirmation email containing a link to the new form. You may submit up to five tracks (mp3, ogg, wav accepted). Please be prepared to upload all files in one session.

Format Notes: Text can be entered directly into the fields in the application or cut-and-pasted. Formatting such as italics or boldface will drop out. We will only accept your uploaded scripts as PDFs.

PANELISTS: Over the course of ten months, from September to June, a seven-person panel, comprised of New Dramatists’ current resident writers, alumni playwrights, and outside theatre professionals, read the submissions. The panel is completely different every year. Special efforts are made to balance the panel in terms of aesthetic sensibilities, gender, race, and age, as diversity is crucial to the adjudication process. The only people who know the panel members’ identities are the New Dramatists’ admissions staff.

CIRCULATION: All applicants submit two full-length works and designate an “A” play and a “B” play. All “A” plays are read in the initial round. As applicants advance through the process, their “B” plays are read. For the Initial Round, reading is blind, i.e. applicant names are not attached to the plays being read. In the Semi-Final and Final Round, names are disclosed to the readers. (In addition, each current resident playwright has the option to recommend one applicant who is guaranteed to have both the “A” and “B” plays read by different readers in the Initial Round. This does not impact the applicant’s status.)

DECISION-MAKING: The panel meets three times between January and June to discuss the plays and, by consensus, winnow the list of applicants and ultimately determine the incoming group.

NOTIFICATION: Status notifications are sent on a rolling basis: the first round of letters goes out in January/February, the second round of letters goes out in March/April, and the final round of letters goes out in May/June. Writers who are accepted into New Dramatists are notified in May/June. If your mailing address and/or other contact information changes, please notify @email