The 2025 Edwin Booth Award: Honoring Michael R. Jackson

The 2025 Edwin Booth Award honors a person, company, or organization whose work bridges professional and academic theatre. Named after the nineteenth-century actor celebrated for his artistry and intellect, the award has recognized influential figures and groups such as Stephen Sondheim, Diana Taylor, Spiderwoman Theatre, and The Wooster Group.

Michael R. Jackson was one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people of 2022. His Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics Circle winning A Strange Loop (which had its 2019 world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in association with Page 73 Productions) received 11 Tony nominations in 2022, and was called "a full-on laparoscopy of the heart, soul, and loins" as well as a "gutsy, jubilantly anguished musical with infectious melodies" by Ben Brantley for The New York Times. In addition to A Strange Loop, he also wrote book, music and lyrics for White Girl in Danger, and book and lyrics for Teeth which opened at New World Stages in Fall 2024. Awards and associations include: a New Professional Theatre Festival Award, a Jonathan Larson Grant, a Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, an ASCAP Foundation Harold Adamson Award, a Whiting Award, the Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting, an Outer Critics Circle Award, a Drama Desk Award, an Obie Award, a Fred Ebb Award, a Windham-Campbell Prize, a Dramatist Guild Fellowship and he is an alum of Page 73’s Interstate 73 Writers Group.

“Emerging/Emergent” is this years theme for the graduate student conference, hosted by the PhD Program in Theatre and Performance at the Graduate Center, CUNY. In moments of political, ecological, and social precarity, the act of emerging is not simply a debut—it is a response, a resistance, and a reconfiguration. We seek to foreground the emerging/emergent as a product of resilience, reclamation, and urgency under contemporary and contemporaneous constraints. 

The conference features three academic panels, exploring the theme from the perspectives of emerging media, intersectional identities, and archival research for “new” technologies. Additionally, one round table session is dedicated to emerging scholars and artists who wish to share resources and connect with each other. 

The 2025 “Emerging/Emergent” graduate student conference is hosted by the Ph.D. Program in Theatre and Performance at the Graduate Center. Organized by Zhixuan Zhu, Joao Toledo, Allison Marotta, Pune Dracker, and Chris Harder, who will also be in charge for the Booth Award ceremony. Harder is PhD Candidate in the Theatre and Performance Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research interests include histories of boylesque, male burlesk, and queer striptease in the United States and the role of erotic performance in shaping sexual subcultures.