Now in our second year with a revamped submission process centering equity, which garnered an incredibly diverse and engaging array of plays, Fresh Ink is thrilled to share our 2024-2025 season playwrights and plays, along with our finalists! This season explores how different intersectional identities collide with all types of intimate relationships: from sex and romance, to family and friends, to fully knowing your own self.
We’re offering three residencies with public performances: our Ink Spot Residency, awarded to two playwrights this season, includes both a workshop exploration and a public staged reading; our Development Residency in collaboration with CHUANG STAGE, which includes two workshops and a public staged reading; and our year-long Production Residency, which includes two workshops, one public staged reading, and a world premiere production.
Additionally, in celebration of dramaturgically-driven processes, we are entering our second season offering a Inkubation Residency, where a playwright will work one-on-one with a dramaturg for the entire season to develop their play.
This year, we are thrilled to partner with CHUANG Stage for our Development and Inkubation residencies! CHUANG Stage is Boston’s Asian American theatre company cultivating joyful and radical pan-Asian stories. The collaboration between Fresh Ink Theatre Company and CHUANG Stage is dedicated to empowering communities and uplifting stories that reflect the ever-expanding Boston identity. Through new work journeys with two next-generation, local Asian American playwrights, this is a joint invitation and call-to-action in centering Asian American and Pacific Islander artists and their voices. At this table, we invite them to get messy, explore, and luxuriate in their artistry.
Join Fresh Ink and CHUANG Stage as we fall in love and lust in a haunted realm (Bone by Bone), navigate the sometimes humorous situations of dating while ace (Why Won’t You Bang Me?), unravel into a Chinese American coming-of-age fever dream (Ugly Feelings), and dive into the sugar baby life while navigating the complexities of class and privilege as a fat woman of color (Sugar).
We are proud to be able to offer a home for our season playwrights to grow these worlds while celebrating the stories they have to tell. Learn more below and join us!
Production Residency
April 17 - May 13, 2025
Boston Center for the Arts
Brooke, attempting to navigate the world without a family, support system, or access to opportunity, finds herself working over 90 hours a week at three jobs to pay rent, bill collectors, student loans, and manage one meal a day – and she still comes up short every single week. That is, until she is presented with an opportunity that she cannot say no to: the Sugar Bowl.
Tara Moses (she/her) is a citizen of Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, award-winning playwright, director, and co-Founder of Groundwater Arts. As a playwright, her completed works include Sections, He’eo’o (Winner of the 2019 Native Storytellers Contest), Quantum (2020 and 2021 Finalist for the National Playwrights Conference), Bound (2019 Native American New Play Festival Winner), Hamlet: El Príncipe de Denmark, Don Juan, Arbeka (Supported by First Peoples Fund Cultural Capital Fellowship), Patchwork, Oñgwehoñwe, Snag, Sugar, OklaHOME, Billie, Othello, and Poyvfekc. Selected development/production theaters include: Company One Theatre (Boston, MA); AlterTheatre Ensemble (San Rafael, CA); Kitchen Dog Theater (Dallas, TX); Geva Theatre Center (Rochester, NY); Oregon Shakespeare Festival (Ashland, OR); American Indian Community House (New York, NY); Safe Harbors Indigenous Collective (New York, NY); Sound Theatre Company (Seattle, WA); Good Luck Macbeth Theatre Company (Reno, NV); Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program (New Haven, CT); Native Voices at the Autry (Los Angeles, CA); Oklahoma Indigenous Theatre Company (Oklahoma City, OK); No Peeking Theatre Company (Jersey City, NJ); and #BingeTheatreCompany (Washington, D.C.). She holds a B.A. in Theatre from the University of Tulsa and is a MFA candidate in Directing at Brown University/Trinity Rep. www.taramoses.com
Development Residency with CHuang Stage
Staged Reading - March 7 - 9, 2025
Boston Center for the Arts
Enter the abstract world of angst, confusion, and teenage fantasy as two multiracial Chinese American twins navigate growing up in a white-dominated New England suburb, where they’ve never quite felt like they belong.
Karina Cowperthwaite (she/her) is a director and playwright based in Cambridge, MA. A recent graduate of Harvard College with a joint degree in English and Theater, Dance and Media, Karina is passionate about uplifting Asian American work and challenging her own definition of what Asian American theater is and can be. As Co-President of the Asian Student Arts Project (ASAP), she directed a Pan-Asian adaptation of Legally Blonde, the first musical on Harvard's campus with an all Asian cast which was featured on NBC News as well as writing, directing and acting in an original play titled Ugly Feelings at the Loeb Drama Center which was nominated for a Hoopes Prize. For her work in college, Karina was awarded the Lee Patrick Award in Drama, The David McCord Prize and Harvard College Women's Center Transformational Leadership Award. Professional credits include WILD: A Musical Becoming (Assistant Director, American Repertory Theater), A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical (Assistant to the Producer). Karina currently serves as the Artistic Coordinator and Special Assistant to the Artistic Director at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University.
Ink Spot Residency
Staged Reading November 1-3, 2024
Boston Center for the Arts
Muna and Chris navigate their complicated relationship within the walls of an abandoned attic, as visions of Farouz and Yasir navigating theirs haunt the space. Histories collide, spirits take hold, and the attic transforms into its own space in time holding examinations of sex, shame, and the cost of being okay.
Sharifa Yasmin (she/her) is a trans Arab-American director, actor, and playwright. She has completed directing fellowships with The Drama League, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Manhattan Theatre Club, Geva Theatre, and was a Eugene O’Neill national directing fellow. Yasmin’s playwriting focuses on the intersection of Queer and Arab identities. Her plays have been published in Overheard, a collection of monologues by and for TNB2S+ artist and The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays. Her play Close to Home was distinguished by the American Theatre Wing at the annual Antoinette Gala, and was recently included on the 2023 Kilroy’s list. Yasmin was also honored as the inaugural recipient of the SCDF Barbara Whitman Award in 2021 for her work in directing, and holds a MFA in Directing from Brown/Trinity Rep. www.sharifayasmin.com
Ink Spot Residency
Staged Reading March 7-9, 2025
Boston Center for the Arts
Sam, an aspiring comedian, unknowing asexual, and (reluctant) cake decorator, finds themself haunted by their past relationships as they try to start over. But when a certain Gender and Sexuality major pulls them into the dazzling world of asexuality, Sam decides maybe this time they can free themself from ghosts of relationships past.
Elena Toppo (any pronouns) is a Boston-based actor, an aspiring writer, and a director with six years of experience in the Boston theatre scene. They have worked both onstage and behind the scenes as an actor and assistant director for new works. Their most recent assistant directing credits include working on “La Lengua No Tiene Hueso” for Moonbox Producton's New Works Festival and as the Assistant Directing Intern for CSC's Apprenticeship Program. Additionally, Elena recently worked as a script consultant for two years with Scriptmatix, providing feedback to aspiring writers for film and television. They graduated from BU with a degree in Theatre Arts and a minor in Deaf Studies.
InKubation Residency
After their mother's death, three Vietnamese siblings find ill-suited coping mechanisms: the eldest gambles with the neighborhood aunties, the middle sibling falls in love, and the youngest encounters a chain-smoking goblin. The goblin, in the form of an Asian grandmother, tells her her mother has gone to hell. So she follows her down.
Diana Khong (they/them) is a queer Vietnamese playwright, director, and theater educator. As an organizer with roots in Worcester, Massachusetts, their theater-making is tethered to their cultural work of building local solidarity through popular education and mutual aid. To them, theater is the most beautiful means to an end — a catalyst propelling communities in pursuit of a radically transformed world. Their first full-length play was produced by Stanford University’s Asian American Theater Project as their 2022 Spring Mainstage. As a director, their work includes multiple plays with AATP and premiering the official debut of the queer rewrite for Heathers: The Musical, crafted in collaboration with composer Lawrence O’Keefe and playwright Kevin Murphy, for Ram’s Head Theatrical Society. Previous productions also include Ma-Yi Theater’s Somebody is Looking Back at Me (Stage Manager), San Francisco Playhouse’s Paper Dreams of Harry Chin (Asst. Costume/Makeup Design), Stanford TAPS’s Beyond the Wound is Portal (Cast/Collaborator), and Stanford TAPS’s Julius Caesar (Projection Design). When they are not creating, they are teaching theater to youth, believing that the most incendiary ideas are being forged by the next generation.
2024/2025 Finalists
Congratulations to our brilliant, thought-provoking, innovative season finalists! These artists inspired us with their adventurous and unique plots, nuanced characters, and well-crafted relationships. We hope you will put these artists on your radar, support their work, and engage with them as collaborators. Make sure to look up to see their stars on the rise!
Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro, Discombobulated
Henri Blouin, One Woman Rose from the Ocean
Samuel Edwards, The Monastery
Jasmine Rochelle Goodspeed, A World of Dreams
Erin Lerch, Pinch Point
Angele Maraj, Le Temps
Gabriela Tovar, November, Thursday, and the #7