Emerging Artists Celebration 2024

Jake Brasch (he/they) is a writer + actor + composer + clown and a recent graduate of the playwriting program at The Juilliard School. The World Premiere of their play The Reservoir will be presented in 2025 as a co-production between the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Alliance Theatre, and Geffen Playhouse. Jake won the Kennedy Center’s 2024 Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and is the inaugural recipient of the 2024 Terrence McNally Recovery Commission. They’re a member of the 2024 Page 73 Writers Group, a 2023-2024 Alliance/Kendeda Finalist, and a recent graduate of Youngblood at The Ensemble Studio Theatre. Jake has commissions from Manhattan Theatre Club, The Acting Company, and the EST/Sloan Project. With playwright Nadja Leonhard-Hooper, he is a Co-Founder of American Sing-Song, a collective that writes and performs filthy hour-long musicals. He recently retired from his career as a birthday party clown and is developing a series based on his exploits. Jake has three brothers, 14 pairs of glasses, and lives in Brooklyn with Marvin (his sourdough starter) as well as his brilliant husband Tyler Brasch. BFA: NYU Tisch. jakebrasch.com

Kameron Neal is an artist and designer working across video, installation, and performance. As a Public Artist in Residence with New York City’s Department of Records he created Down the Barrel (of a Lens), an archival film installation interrogating NYPD surveillance. As a projection designer, Kameron has worked on numerous productions including Ryan J. Haddad’s Dark Disabled Stories at The Public Theater, for which he received Lucille Lortel and Henry Hewes Design Awards. He is the recipient of a Princess Grace Award, an Opera America Award for his collaborations with composer Paul Pinto, and a prizewinner in the National Portrait Gallery’s 2025 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. He also co-created MukhAgni with Shayok Misha Chowdhury, an irreverent multimedia performance memoir about death that was presented at Under the Radar. Artist residencies include MacDowell, Yaddo, CultureHub, ALL ARTS, MAXmachina, Ars Nova’s Makers Lab, and The Public Theater’s Devised Theater Working Group. Kameron’s work has been seen in The New York Times, Forbes, HYPEBEAST and presented at a variety of institutions including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lincoln Center, Museum of the City of New York, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Williams College Museum of Art, and Sound Scene at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum.  Kameron is a 2024-25 Movement Lab Fellow at the Rhode Island School of Design in their Film/Animation/Video Department. kameronneal.com

PAULA VOGEL is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright whose plays include Indecent (Tony Award nomination for Best Play), How I Learned to Drive (Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tony Award nomination, the Lortel Prize, OBIE Award, Drama Desk Award, Outer Critics Circle and New York Drama Critics Awards for Best Play), The Long Christmas Ride Home, The Mineola Twins, The Baltimore Waltz, Hot’n’Throbbing, Desdemona, And Baby Makes Seven, The Oldest Profession and A Civil War Christmas. Her Mother Play play will premiere on Broadway in April 2024. In June 2020, she founded Paula Vogel’s Bard at the Gate, a uniquely curated virtual reading series designed to become a widely accessible platform for powerful, overlooked plays by BIPOC, female, LGBTQIA+, and disabled artists.  Lifetime achievement awards include:  American Theatre Hall of Fame Award, the Obie Award, and NY Drama Critics Circle Award.  She is honored to have awards dedicated to emerging playwrights in her name: The American College Theatre Festival’s Paula Vogel Award in Playwriting, and the Paula Vogel Award given annually by the Vineyard Theatre. She was the 2019 inaugural UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television Hearst Theater Lab Initiative Distinguished Playwright-in-Residence. Her plays are published in six volumes by TCG Press and her memoir will be published by Penguin Press. She teaches playwriting workshops throughout the United States and abroad. www.paulavogelplaywright.com

In 2023, Colman Domingo produced and starred in the independent film Sing Sing directed by Greg Kwedar which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, which sold to A24 for a 2024 release. Colman received the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival Tribute Award for Distinguished Career Achievement. Earlier this year Domingo was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Production of a Play for the Pulitzer Prize winning play Fat Ham on Broadway. He won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama, a Hollywood Critics Association Award for Best Actor in a Limited Series/Anthology, and an Imagen Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama for his role as Ali in the HBO series Euphoria. Colman stars in an eight part limited series for Netflix entitled The Madness, directed by Clement Virgo, due in 2024.

Colman Domingo stars in the Netflix | Higher Ground film Rustin as Bayard Rustin which premiered at Telluride and TIFF. He also stars as Mister in the Warner Brothers | Oprah Winfrey | Steven Spielberg produced The Color Purple musical motion picture that premieres on Christmas Day. A two time Film Independent Spirit, Gotham, SAG, Critics Choice, NAACP Image, Tony®, Sir Lawrence Olivier, Drama Desk, Drama League and NAACP Theatre Award nominee for his work on stage and screen, Colman is an OBIE and Lucille Lortel Award winning actor, playwright, director and producer.

Colman has starred in some of the most profound films in recent years such as Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk, Steven Spielbergs’ Lincoln, Lee Daniel’s The Butler, Ava DuVernay’s Selma, Nia DaCosta’s Candyman and Janicza Bravo’s Zola. As a writer, his plays and musicals include Dot (Samuel French), Wild with Happy (Dramatist Play Service) and A Boy and His Soul (Oberon Books), the Tony Award nominated Broadway musical Summer: The Donna Summer Musical and Geffen Playhouse’s groundbreaking musical Light’s Out: Nat King Cole. His plays have been produced by The Public Theater, Vineyard, La Jolla Playhouse, Humana Festival of New American Plays, New York Stage and Film, A.C.T, The Tricycle Theater in London, Brisbane Powerhouse in Australia, among others.

Domingo received his Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from Ursinus College. He is on the faculty of University of Southern California, School of Dramatic Arts as a Professor of acting, after having served as a Juilliard School Creative Associate and a faculty member of the Yale School of Drama. He has been honored with the inaugural Denver Film CinemaQ-LaBahn Ikon Film Award, the National Hispanic Media Coalition Impact Award, the Creative Coalition Television Humanitarian Award and the Atlanta’s Out On Film Icon Award. Through his award-winning production company, Edith Productions, Colman develops television, film, theater and animation projects.