Ian August Receives N.J. Council of the Arts Playwriting Fellowship

Ian August (Bunn Library Outreach Services Assistant and Lawrenceville School Student Activities Assistant Coordinator) is a recipient of a 2021 Playwriting Fellowship of $13,000 from the New Jersey State Council of the Arts. The New Jersey Individual Artist Fellowships are competitive awards to New Jersey artists in 12 different disciplines granted solely on independent peer panel assessment of work samples. The anonymous process is focused on artistic quality, and awards may be used to help artists produce new work and advance their careers. This program is carried out in partnership with the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation.

An internationally-produced playwright, August said he was “stunned” upon learning he’d received the Fellowship. “I'm always surprised if I win anything. The competition is always stiff, and the adjudicators are all responding or connecting to different elements of the work, so it's impossible to predict an outcome,” he remarked. “I know a lot of other writers who have been awarded this Fellowship--really talented people who I've worked with and studied with and admired. I'm extremely proud to be among them.”

August doesn’t have any immediate plans for the award funding. “Some of it will go to application fees for other competitions, and some of it will act as compensation for research materials I've already purchased to work on various projects,” he explained. “Once the world opens up again, I'd like to use some of the award to travel to a few of the locations I plan to write about in my next work--but it's hard to think about that while we're all still in lockdown, so it might take some time.”

His plays have been developed at the Powerhouse Theatre Festival (Vassar/New York Stage and Film), the Great Plains Theatre Conference, the Ashland New Plays Festival, Scripps Ranch Theatre, Red Mountain Theatre Company, Orlando Shakespeare Theatre, New Jersey Repertory Company, Wordsmyth Theatre Company, the Garry Marshall Theatre, UC Davis Dept. of Theatre and Dance, the Philadelphia Artists Collective, the Dennis and Victoria Ross Foundation, the Williamstown Theatre Festival, the NY, Philly, and Edinburgh Fringe Festivals, and elsewhere.

August is a founding member of the Princeton-based playwright collective, The Witherspoon Circle, a current member of the American Theatre Group's LGBTQ+ / BIPOC Play Lab, and a graduated member of PlayPenn’s playwriting workshop, The Foundry. Several of August’s plays have been published by Samuel French Inc., Smith and Kraus Publishing, the One-Act Play Depot, and Pipeline / Applause Books.

He was a 2019 Playwright in Residence at the William Inge Center for the Arts in Independence, Kansas, and graduate of Goddard College’s Creative Writing MFA Program. In addition to his work at Lawrenceville, he is currently an adjunct professor in Playwriting at Stockton University in Stockton, N.J. 

For additional information, please contact Lisa M. Gillard Hanson, director of Public Relations, at lgillard@lawrenceville.org.