Roxane Gay, Sidney Madison Prescott & Carmelita Tropicana Join Soho Rep Board – Broadway World
Soho Rep has announced that writer and social commentator Roxane Gay, Global Head of Intelligent Automation at Spotify Sidney Madison Prescott, and artist Carmelita Tropicana have joined the organization’s Board of Directors.
Cynthia Flowers, one of Soho Rep’s three Directors (alongside Sarah Benson and Meropi Peponides), said, “We are deeply honored that these three incredible people-who are each highly accomplished, passionate, innovative leaders-have chosen to join our Board. They will each bring to the theater new ideas, connections, and resources, which are critical for fulfilling our mission. I know that Roxane, Sidney, and Carmelita will challenge our thinking in new ways, and that they also care deeply about supporting the staff and bettering the lives of artists at Soho Rep and across the field.”
Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women, and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects. She has a newsletter, The Audacity, and a podcast, The Roxane Gay Agenda.
Roxane said, “I’m excited to join the board of Soho Rep because I believe in the theater and theater-makers they support. Great art needs to be nurtured, and I am invested in supporting that nurturing in any way I can.”
Amber Tamblyn, a Soho Rep Board Member and the Co-Chair of its Nominating Committee, said, “I’ve known Roxane for more than a decade and believe her experience as an artist across mediums and genres coupled with her abundant love for theater will make her an excellent fellow board member for Soho Rep. We’re so thrilled to be working alongside her in the name of bold and daring theater.”
Sidney Madison Prescott is the Global Head of Intelligent Automation (Robotic Process Automation, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence) at Spotify. She led intelligent process automation for a leading global investment firm immediately prior to joining Spotify, and early in her career was Vice President of Intelligent Process Automation at BNY Mellon. In addition to her enterprise technology expertise, Sidney is an Executive Board Member for three global non-profit organizations where she contributes automation insights to enhance overall program objectives. Sidney was recently elected to the board of the Habitat for Humanity, New York City Young Professionals organization. She is an active champion of women in technology and is former head of the East Coast chapter of the global non-profit organization Women in Tech. In January 2020, Sidney was awarded the prestigious 2020 Top 50 Tech Visionaries Award. In 2019, she was nominated by the USA Women in Payments awards committee and a group of her peers for a coveted “Rising Star in Payments” award. Also in 2019, the global organization Women in IT nominated Sidney for the Silicon Valley “Rising Star in IT” award. Sidney co-authored the book Robotic Process Automation Using UiPath StudioX: A Citizen Developer’s Guide to Hyperautomation and the article “Responses to 10 Common Criticisms of Anti-Racism Action in STEMM,” in the academic journal PLOS Computational Biology, among other published writings.
Sidney commented, “The mission of Soho Rep emboldens action inside and outside of the theater, which is critical at this juncture. The passion and foresight of the organization in support of artistic and cultural exploration is nothing short of astonishing. I am honored to add my insights to Soho Rep’s collective effort to instill a sense of curiosity and scrutiny about the world around us through artistic expression.”
Carmelita Tropicana is an acclaimed theater artist whose performances and plays have been presented in theaters, museums, alternative performance spaces, and galleries worldwide. She was a member of the inaugural cohort of Soho Rep Project Number One, which brings artists on as salaried staff members to experiment and collaborate on new work, and to join Soho Rep in imagining a more sustainable, ethically sound, equitable theater. Carmelita’s writing has appeared in numerous anthologies, and a collection of her scripts, short stories, and essays appear in her book I, Carmelita Tropicana, Performing Between Cultures. Carmelita co-edited, with Holly Hughes and Jill Dolan, the Lambda Award-nominated book Memories of the Revolution: The First Ten Years of the Wow Café Theater. She has received a Mellon Foundation Latinx Artist Fellowship, a United States Artists Fellowship (2021), a CLAGS: Center for LGBTQ Studies José Muñoz Award (2021), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2017), Creative Capital award (2016), an Anonymous Was A Woman grant (2005), and an OBIE (1999). She has served on the Board of Directors of Performance Space New York (PS 122), and currently serves on the New York Foundation for the Arts Board of Directors.
Carmelita reflected, “I was part of a play reading at Soho Rep in 1991, but my real connection to the theater came when I saw Blasted, written by Sarah Kane and directed by Sarah Benson, in 2008. It took my breath away. I was hooked and kept coming back and experiencing many plays including two more masterpieces, An Octoroon and Fairview, and the stellar productions that made up the theater’s 2021-22 season. My involvement with Soho Rep deepened when I was chosen to participate in Project Number One. During the COVID shutdown, it was a much-needed life line. Not only did it pay a salary, but I got to meet other amazing artists and get to know Sarah, Cynthia, and Meropi as extraordinary professionals-talented, thoughtful, civic-minded creatives who let us into the process of how the organization runs. As an artist who has served and serves on the executive boards of different arts organizations, I know the importance of a company that advocates for artists and produces compelling work. I find it an honor and a privilege to join the Board of Soho Rep, a theater with an outstanding legacy, doing work that is innovative and vital to New York’s theater landscape.
Jackie Sibblies Drury, a Member of the Soho Rep Board and its Nominating Committee, and Co-Chair of the Soho Rep Writer Director Lab, said, “I’m thrilled that Roxane, Sidney, and Carmelita Tropicana are joining us. Obviously, Roxane is one of the foremost thinkers of our time, and, as such, I’ve been so moved not only by her joyful advocacy for art and artists, but also by her inclusion of theater in larger cultural conversations. Sidney is an incredibly intelligent Black woman who has achieved so much success in a traditionally white male space, and Carmelita’s work has inspired an entire generation of performance and theater artists. So I’m very much looking forward to seeing the ways these three incredible humans and theater lovers will help shape the future of our theater. “
Roxane, Sidney, and Carmelita join Soho Rep as it gears up for its 2022-23 season, which consists entirely of large-scale works by early-career artists that have been commissioned by the organization: Kate Tarker‘s Montag, directed by Dustin Wills, with original music composed by Daniel Schlosberg (October 12 – November 13, 2022); Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s Public Obscenities, co-commissioned and produced with the NAATCO National Partnership Project, originating in Chowdhury’s time in Soho Rep Project Number One, and directed by him (February 15 – March 26, 2023); and Jillian Walker‘s play with music The Whitney Album, directed by Jenny Koons (May 24 – July 2, 2023). Additionally, Soho Rep’s celebrated production of Hansol Jung‘s Wolf Play, directed by Dustin Wills and in collaboration with Ma-Yi Theater Company, plays at MCC Theater starting January 2023. Soho Rep’s Project Number One continues in the 2022-23 season, bringing artists Hahnji Jang and Kate McGee into the organization.
About Soho Rep
Soho Rep provides radical theater makers with productions of the highest caliber and tailor-made development at key junctures in their artistic practice. The organization elevates artists as thought leaders and citizens who change the field and society. Artistic autonomy is paramount at Soho Rep; the organization encourages an unmediated connection between artists and audiences to create a springboard for transformation and rich civic life beyond the walls of its theater.
Critics continue to herald Soho Rep as a go-to theatre destination for new and original works. New York Magazine says, “this indispensable theater offers more excitement per chair than any space in town,” Time Out New York says, “Soho Rep is the best theater in NYC,” and The New York Times describes Soho Rep as “form-twisting, boundary-breaking, and acclaimed” and says, “The downtown powerhouse… regularly outclasses the work done on many of the city’s larger stages.” The Village Voice named Soho Rep the “Best Off-Broadway Theater Company,” and the company was listed in Travel Magazine’s “10 Essential Off-Broadway Theaters.”
Soho Rep has also been honored with a Drama Desk Award for Sustained Achievement. Over the last decade, Soho Rep productions have garnered 21 OBIE Awards; the 2016 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Musical; 13 Drama Desk nominations; two Kesselring Awards; The New York Times Outstanding Playwriting Award for Dan LeFranc‘s Sixty Miles To Silverlake; and a special citation in The New York Drama Critics’ Circle’s 2012-13 awards. Jackie Sibblies Drury‘s Fairview, commissioned by Soho Rep and Berkeley Repertory Theatre, won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In recent years, Soho Rep has presented plays by established and emerging theater artists such as David Adjmi, Annie Baker, Alice Birch, Debbie Tucker Green, Aleshea Harris, Lucas Hnath, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Daniel Alexander Jones, Richard Maxwell, Sarah Kane, Young Jean Lee, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and Anne Washburn.