Announcing the 2021-22 Women Leaders Fellows

Through the success of this year’s PlayGround Gala and the Fund-a-Future campaign, PlayGround is establishing five (5) one-year paid fellowships for early-career women artists, in the areas of directing, acting, playwriting, design/tech, and theatre management. In the spirit of PlayGround’s June Anne Baker Prize, which has fostered a community of twenty early-career women playwrights over the past twenty years, the new Women Leader Fellowships are intended to create an ongoing and growing community of future women leaders, representing all theatrical disciplines.

We’re excited to announce our 2021-22 cohort of Women Leader Fellows are:
Tessa Corrie, for Directing
Rosie Hallett, for Acting
Genevieve Jessee, for Playwriting
Jasmine Murray, for Design/Tech, and
Lindsey Abbott, for Theatre Management

Fellows will receive a one-year guaranteed income of $5,000 (based on $20 per hour), to be applied toward a personalized residency that takes advantage of the unique opportunities for professional growth offered through PlayGround programming, offers mentorship through PlayGround senior staff and company veterans, and is uniquely designed to meet the long-term needs and goals of the individual fellow. All fellowships will include support for networking, including introductions and opportunities to collaborate with artists who can continue to foster fellows’ future success.

These Fellowships have been made possible by our generous donors to our  Fund-a-Future campaign at this year’s PlayGround Gala, which generated $25,ooo to help fund this initiative. PlayGround is seeking to raise another $100,000 to fund four additional years of the Women Theatre Artist Fellowships and is accepting additional donations at https://playground-sf.org/benefit-auction/.

Women Leaders Fellow Rosie commented, “I’m thrilled and grateful to have the opportunity to focus on leveling up my craft as an actor through the Women Leaders Fellowship! Playground has been a vital artistic home for me and for so many others; I look forward to engaging even more deeply with the company in the year ahead and am honored to be included in this cohort of gifted women.” Tessa remarked, “I’m so thrilled to be selected for this fellowship and continue my growth as a director at PlayGround!” And Genevieve stated, “I am a firm believer that when we make space for the work, pathways we never imagined reveal themselves.”

Tessa Corrie (she/her), is a Queer and Latinx Theater Director based in the Bay Area. Her work is grounded in creating space for marginalized and underrepresented communities and narratives. She is a company member and ambassador at PlayGround SF and an artistic associate at Hillbarn Theatre. Her credits include work at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, Center REPertory Company, Hillbarn Theatre, Pear Theatre, Shotgun Players, TheatreFirst, Dragon Productions Theatre, Fuse Theatre, The Playwrights’ Center of San Francisco, PlayGround SF, PianoFight, More Más Marami Arts, Poltergeist Theatre Project, AmiosWest, and Our Digital Stories.

Rosie Hallett (she/her) is an Equity and SAG-AFTRA-eligible actor. A Playground Company Member since 2012, Rosie has been heavily involved in new play development at Playground, Playwrights Foundation, the Magic, ACT, TheatreWorks, Marin Theatre Company, Ojai Playwrights Conference, and others. She is a Core Company Member of Word for Word Performing Arts Company, and has originated roles in shows that ran in San Francisco and France. Recent theater credits include Mother of the Maid (MTC), Top Girls and Men on Boats (ACT), Smut (Word for Word), and Red Speedo (Center Rep). Rosie holds degrees in English and Theater from Stanford University. She grew up in Montana.

Genevieve Jessee (she/her) is a playwright  based in Puerto Rico. She received her MFA in Playwriting from Boston University. Her work has been staged at PlayGround, The Source Festival, Atlanta Black Theatre Festival, San Francisco Fringe Festival, EXIT theatre, Those Women Productions and the Festival de Marseille. She is the recipient of commissions from PlayGround and Planet Earth Arts. Her awards include the June Anne Baker Prize, Best of the San Francisco Fringe (2012), Emerging Playwright Award (PlayGround), Congo Square Theater’s 2021 Professional 10 minute play competition winner, and the recipient of a California Arts Council Artists-in-Communities grant. She was a fellow at the 2018 Cultural Diaspora Playwriting Residency at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France where she further developed her play The Rendering Cycle (Formerly The Diaspora Cycle), which was a finalist for the 2019 Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Semi-finalist for the 2019 O’neill National Playwright’s Conference and appeared in the 2020 Kilroys list.

Jasmine Murray (she/her) is pursuing a career in Stage Management. She grew up in Long Beach, CA and graduated from SFSU in May with a Bachelor’s degree in Theatre Arts with a minor in Business Administration. She began stage managing in high school and knew immediately she could see herself doing it as a career. She always knew she wanted to be in the entertainment industry but it wasn’t until high school that she figured out which track best suited her. She’s looking forward to exploring the world of theatre and seeing what magic she can help create for the next generation of theatre kids. 

Lindsey Abbott (she/her) is an MFA candidate at CUNY Brooklyn College for theatre management. She currently works at Berkeley Rep as a Patron Experience Representative (PER) as well as working at PlayGround as a producing fellow. She hopes to work throughout the Bay Area in theatre, enhancing the community and supporting voices that have systematically been silenced.

PlayGround, a leading playwright incubator and theatre community hub, provides unique development opportunities for the Bay Area’s, Los Angeles’ and now New York’s best new playwrights, including the monthly Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series, annual PlayGround Festival of New Works, full-length play commissions and support for the production of new plays by local playwrights through the New Play Production Fund. To date, PlayGround has supported over 250 early career playwrights, developing and staging more than 1,000 of their original short plays through the Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series and the PlayGround Festival. PlayGround has also commissioned 90 new full-length plays by 60 of these writers through its Commissioning Initiative and, through the innovative New Play Production Fund, has directly facilitated the premiere of 34 plays at theaters of every size, including three that have gone on to NYC and other major theatre communities. Most recently, PlayGround renovated and relaunched the former Thick House Theater in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill as Potrero Stage, a state-of-the-art center for new plays, home to PlayGround’s expanding artistic programs and some of the Bay Area’s most distinguished new play developers and producers. Over the past twenty-seven years, PlayGround has served to identify some of the most important new local voices for the theatre. PlayGround’s alumni have gone on to win local, national, and international honors for their short and full-length work, including recognition at the Steinberg Awards, Humana Festival, O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and The Lark’s Playwrights’ Week, among others. PlayGround received the 2009 Paine Knickerbocker Award for outstanding contributions to Bay Area theatre, 3 BATCC Awards for Best Original Script for PlayGround commissions, a 2014 National Theatre Company Grant from the American Theatre Wing (founder of the Tony Awards®), and a 2016 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award. Visit https://playground-sf.org for more information.

For more information, visit https://playground-sf.org/benefit-auction/ or call (415) 992-6677.