Announcing the 2024-25 WRT Grant Recipients
Wellesley Repertory Theatre is thrilled to announce the first recipients of the Wellesley Repertory Theatre Grant. The WRT grant provides project-based support to Wellesley College graduates for the development and/or production of unpublished/unproduced work in the field through unrestricted funding that supports artistic process. Projects are expected to be completed during the 2024-25 academic year. Our three recipients will convene at Wellesley College in Fall 2025 to share their vision and experience with students, faculty, staff, and Wellesley community members at the Wellesley Repertory Theatre Festival.
From Marta Rainer, Artistic Producer of Wellesley Rep and Director of Wellesley College Theatre: Our company mission has ever been to fortify our professional artistic community for an ensemble of Wellesley College students, graduates, educators, and local theatre makers with joy and care. With these grants, Wellesley Repertory Theatre continues to bolster career progression for Wellesley College graduate theatre-makers through a new pathway, and to encourage creative risk, by establishing bespoke laboratory conditions for artistic growth and fostering artistic engagement in both our campus and their own communities. We take our responsibility to be effective and intentional stewards of the resources endowed to us very seriously. We aspire to create opportunities that have direct and lasting impact on the manifold creative lives and careers of our graduates in an evolving, multifaceted artistic landscape. We were happily overwhelmed by the breadth and scope and vision of the many applications entrusted to us for our consideration. The projects of our three Wellesley Rep grantees each in their own way sit at the crossroads of so much accumulated skill and curiosity! We are honored to support them and this dynamic beginning.”
Our 2024-25 WRT Grant Recipients are:
MAIA MACDONALD
Maia Macdonald (Class of ‘06) is an interdisciplinary artist and producer living in Brooklyn, NY. Her work is grounded in a transcendent faith in the power of sound to transport, heal, and transform us. Since graduating from Wellesley in 2006, Maia has been immersed in the creative arts world; developing her recording ethos, touring as a multi-instrumentalist, interviewing other artists, producing & mixing music and podcasts, and designing sound. She has spent the past several years within a crucible, gnawing at a collective bone, molting, re-emergent. www.maiamacdonald.com
The WRT Grant will fund the development of an immersive stage show built around a deep new body of musical work, traversing ancestral timelines, fragments of memory, and the reconciliation of multiple truths. The project seeks to engage audiences through movement practices, dynamic sound and lighting design, and innovative approaches to music making. Intended as an adaptable, living work, this piece will draw on multiple disciplines as it dares us to answer the call.
SABINA SETHI UNNI - FLOOD SENSOR AUNTY
Sabina Sethi Unni (Class of ‘19) is a public theater artist, community organizer, and urban planner who tells funny stories about our changing climate in public spaces. She is the co-founder of Fresh Lime Soda, a contemporary South Asian political theater ensemble. She’s proudest of creating theater in open spaces in every corner of her city: Hunts Point Riverside Park, Traver’s Park, Queens Botanical Garden, Qahwah House Astoria, Washington Square Park, Newkirk Open Street, La Plaza Cultural, Lt. Frank McConnell Park, Rockaway Beach, Gowanus Dredgers Community Boathouse, PYO Chai, Edgemere Farm, Rockaway Community Park, 31st Avenue Open Street, PS Family NYC, & more if you let her! Sabina studied Anthropology at Wellesley with an unofficial double major in the Wellesley College Shakespeare Society. www.sabinasethiunni.com
Flood Sensor Aunty is about a flood sensor working at her aunt’s chai shop who really wants to be a movie star. Halfway between really funny public theater and community disaster prevention, this devised show is about how the best way to protect yourself from flooding, climate change, and despair is through knowing your neighbors. As part of NYC Emergency Management's National Disaster Prevention Month, we've had four free performances in chai shops and brown public spaces across Queens and Nassau County - PYO CHAI (Stewart Manor, Nassau), Qahwah House (Astoria), Lt. Frank McConnell Park (Richmond Hill), and Travers Park (Jackson Heights) - and audiences left with bellies full of (oat milk) chai, headlamps, flood alarms, zines with resources about flood protection, and laughs. Flood Sensor Aunty is directed and co-written by Sabina Sethi Unni, with a team of fifteen devisers and designers (partly performers with deep experience in movement and theater work and partly community organizers working and living in the neighborhoods we perform). The WRT Grant will go toward further development of the piece. For more, see: https://sabinasethiunni.com/flood-sensor-aunty.
ANNIE JIN WANG - ANNA MAY WONG: THE ACTRESS WHO DIED A THOUSAND DEATHS
Annie Jin Wang (Class of ’14, she/hers) is a first-generation Chinese-American dramaturg for new plays, musicals, and opera. From new play development to revitalizing classic texts for today’s audiences, Annie’s body of work primarily investigates constructs of race, gender, and citizenship through a compassionate and critical lens. Recent credits include: Beth Morrison Projects, NYC PAC, Musical Theatre Factory, Yangtze Rep, The Civilians, CHUANG Stage, The Playwrights Center, Theater Mu, and the Croatian National Theatre. As a generative artist, her work has been developed through Soho Rep, Target Margin Theater, Ferocious Lotus Theatre Company, Fresh Ground Pepper, and PlayGround-NY. Annie serves as the Associate Director for Artistic Programming at PlayCo and the Artistic Associate at Theater Mu. At Wellesley, she majored in Art History and Cinema & Media Studies, and was a proud member of the Shakespeare Society and Upstage Productions. MFA: Columbia University. wang-annie.com
Anna May Wong: The Actress Who Died A Thousand Deaths takes place in a surrealist dreamscape within Asian American screen icon Anna May Wong’s mind and memories, exploring the racial, gender, class, and cultural tensions an ambitious Chinatown girl faced as she became a Hollywood actress. Intercut with real and imagined conversations between Wong and important people throughout her life including her father, Warner Oland, and Marlene Dietrich, this experimental play utilizes an ensemble of five performers, ‘live cinema performance’, and archival footage to recreate and reframe iconic scenes from Wong’s films, subverting the type-cast, orientalist tropes she constantly portrayed. Rather than simply recreate Anna May Wong’s iconography, the live camera is used as a tool of empowerment to redirect the gaze that often fetishized Wong’s identity onscreen, serving both its literal function and acting as a metaphorical lens for the audience to more intimately experience Wong’s perspective as an Asian American artist ahead of her time. ‘Live cinema performance’ not only reveals the careful artifice that goes into crafting one’s image, but also sheds light on the power and influence of representation in our lives. Anna May Wong is co-conceived by Annie Jin Wang and Cinthia Chen under the aegis of their creative partnership MOONGATE. Annie’s WRT Grant-funded project will be drafting a new revision of this script and presenting it in a public multimedia workshop.