The Stanley Drama Award
The Stanley Drama Award will return in 2025.
Nearly seventy years since its founding, the award application process is being updated for ease and accessibility. In order to implement these changes, the Stanley Drama Award will be on hiatus for one year, with no award being offered in 2024, and returning in 2025.
Applications for the 2025 Stanley Drama Award will be open from now until September 1st. Our esteemed panel of judges will determine the winner and finalists, to be announced in Spring 2025. Applicants are now welcome to submit their application online. The required reading fee of $32.00 can be paid online. Once the fee has been paid, please email stanleydramaaward@wagner.edu with a pdf copy of your completed application form, your manuscript, and a confirmation of payment for your reading fee. In the case of musicals, please also include digital links to the music. The deadline for submissions is September 1, 2024.
Click here for the entry form.
The Stanley Drama Award offers a first place prize of $2000 for an original full-length play, musical, or one-act play sequence that has not been professionally produced or received trade book publication. Writers of musicals are urged to submit music on tape or cd. We consider only one submission (a single full-length play, musical, or one-act sequence) per playwright. Plays entered previously in the competition may not be resubmitted. Former Stanley Drama Award winners are not eligible to compete.
The Stanley Drama Award was established in 1957 by Staten Island philanthropist Alma Guyon Timolat Stanley and endowed through the Stanley-Timolat Foundation to encourage and support aspiring playwrights. The national Stanley Award competition is administered by the Wagner College Theatre program, listed for the last decade among the top five college theater programs in the country in the Princeton Review’s annual Best Colleges Guide. The award carries with it a monetary prize along with the distinction of joining the illustrious list of past Stanley Award winners.
The Stanley Drama Award has a long and distinguished history. Past winners include Terrence McNally’s “This Side of the Door” (aka “Things That Go Bump in the Night”), Lonne Elder III’s “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men,” and Jonathan Larson’s “Rent.” Among those judging for the Stanley Award have been playwrights Edward Albee and Paul Zindel, actresses Geraldine Page and Kim Stanley, and TV producer/pioneer talk-show host David Susskind.
Congratulations to our 2023 Stanley Drama Award winner
Jami Brandli for The Magician's Sister
JAMI BRANDLI - Jami Brandli’s plays include The Magician’s Sister, The Romeo and Juliet Senior Citizens Project: A Comedy, Technicolor Life, M-Theory, Through the Eye of a Needle, O: A Rhapsody in Divorce, Visiting Hours, The Caregiver's Guide and BLISS (or Emily Post is Dead!) which was named in the inaugural Kilroys List. Works produced/developed at New Dramatists, New York Theatre Workshop, The Lark, Kitchen Dog Theater, Launch Pad, The Women’s Voices Theater Festival, Moving Arts, The Road, Inkwell Theater, Great Plains Theatre Conference, among other venues. Jami was a participating playwright at Center Theatre Group's 2022 L.A. Writers' Workshop led by Luis Alfaro where she developed her play about female magicians. The Magician's Sister was presented last September as part of CTG's New Works Festival at The Kirk Douglas Theater. The Magician’s Sister recently won the 2023 Jane Chambers Award, and it was workshopped and publicly presented at the 2023 Kayenta New Play Lab in Ivins, UT. It was also a finalist for the 2023 Risk Award.
Additional accolades: BLISS (or Emily Post is Dead!) nominated for Best Playwriting for an Original Play; Los Angeles Ovation Awards. 2020 Under Construction Playwright with The Road. 2019 Humanitas Prize PLAY LA playwright. Winner of John Gassner Memorial Playwriting Award, Holland New Voices Award, Ashland New Plays Festival and Aurora Theatre Company's GAP Prize. Her short works are published with TCG, Dramatic Publishing Company, Applause Books, and Smith & Kraus.
A proud member of The Playwrights Union and The Dramatists Guild, Jami teaches dramatic writing at Lesley University's low-residency MFA program. She is represented by the Michael Moore Agency and Navigation Media. Her plays can also be found on the New Play Exchange. www.jamibrandli.com
Aaron Alon for The Great White Way: The Bert Williams Musical
Kim E. Ruyle for Tennessee Wet Rub
Lynn Hoffman for Martha & Me