Playwriting alum Amalia Oliva Rojas ’25 won The Leah Playwriting Prize for her play In The Bronx Brown Girls Can See Stars Too (or The F*ck Is You Lookin’ At?). The prize awards Rojas with $5,000, a public reading, and a summer workshop as part of the Powerhouse Theatre Program at Vassar College.
In the play, four girls take a communication workshop to avoid going to juvie. Bronx Girls was first staged at the Titan Theatre Company Future Classics Festival while Rojas was a student at Columbia.
“I wrote Bronx Girls as a love letter to all the young black and brown girls who have been told by the world that their dreams are not plausible. Young girls who have been adultified by society, forced to pause their youth in order to navigate adulthood,” Rojas told the Leah Ryan Fund. “This play is a story of girlhood, redemption and most importantly, resilience.”
The annual prize was founded in 2010 to honor the late playwright Leah Ryan and to support work by unrecognized women, trans, and nonbinary playwrights. “Amalia, in particular, truly embodies the spirit of Leah, a woman who strove each day to achieve her dream of being a writer,” said Leah Ryan Fund board member Ed Cheetham.
The Leah Prize has supported playwrights who have gone on to forge successful careers in theater, TV and film. Past recipients’ work has been recognized by the Emmys, the Lambda Literary Award and the MacDowell Fellowship.
Rojas was recently awarded the inaugural Hansberry Lilly Fellowship, a selective, $25,000 pro anno award supporting women and nonbinary playwrights of color during the years they matriculate at institutions like Columbia, Yale, NYU-Tisch and Julliard.
Amalia Oliva Rojas is a Mexican poet, performer, and theatre “artivist” raised and based in Nueva York. Her work centers and archives the stories, myths, and legends told by her family, Women of Color and the New York immigrant community. She is a proud alumnus of the Vassar College Powerhouse Theater Apprentice Program and CUNY Lehman College. Her plays include Tonantzin On the 7 Train, A Step-by-Step Guide on How to Succeed in the Myth-Making Business (Lehman College) and How to Melt ICE (or How the Coyote fell in love with the lizard who was really a butterfly) (New York Women’s Fund Grant, New Perspectives Theatre Company and Boundless Theater Company).
