A recent Hunter College alum has won a prestigious arts award from the Princess Grace Foundation.
Lauren Holmes, MFA Playwriting '23, was named as the winner of the 2024 Princess Grace Playwriting Fellowship, which includes a $15,000 award and a year-long residency at New Dramatists, one of the country’s leading playwright centers and a nationally recognized new play laboratory.
“Lauren is an extraordinary talent with a singular voice, and we are thrilled she’s receiving this prestigious fellowship,” said Christine Scarfuto, director of the Rita and Burton Goldberg MFA Playwriting Program at Hunter's Theatre Department.
A native of Massachusetts with a darkly comic sensibility, Holmes recently adapted the science-fiction novel The Employees by Olga Ravn at Theaterlab. Her work has been developed at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center and The Brick’s Quick + Dirty. Before playwriting, she worked in politics, business, and international diplomacy.
Holmes is the second Hunter graduate to win a Princess Grace Award in the last two years. In 2023, Integrated Media Arts student Wendy Cong Zhao got the award for Film and Animation.
About the Rita and Burton Goldberg MFA Playwriting Program
The Rita and Burton Goldberg MFA Playwriting Program at Hunter College is a highly selective, rigorous, and affordable two-year playwriting program that has proved itself as an incubator of the nation’s top talent by seeking writers who challenge assumptions about what theatre is and will become.
About Princess Grace Awards
Princess Grace Awards identify and elevate emerging talent in theater, dance, and film through game-changing grants. The awards program recognizes creative generators (animators, theater directors, designers, playwrights, choreographers, filmmakers, etc.) and performance-based creatives (actors, dancers, etc.) across all disciplines.
