Playwriting Alumni Zizi Majid ’20 and Julián Mesri ’20 Named Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellows

Playwriting alumni Zizi Majid ’20 and Julián Mesri ’20 have been named Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellows for 2022-2023. This year’s program, which features a cohort of nine fellows, includes playwrights, composers, lyricists, and librettists. Majid is focused on playwriting, while Mesri is concentrated on musical theatre writing. 

The Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellows program is a New York City-based year-long intensive for dramatists looking to develop their existing work and pursue its production as they enter the next level of their careers. The program is free and dedicated to eliminating historical barriers of entry for emerging dramatists. Participants receive a $5,000 Seller-Lehrer Family Foundation Scholarship, mentorship from award-winning dramatists and accomplished professionals, access to career resources and networking opportunities with national arts organizations, and the chance to participate in a presentation of their work for an audience of top theatre professionals. The DGF Fellows program was founded in 2000 on the belief that it is necessary to foster a relationship between playwrights and musical theatre writers in order for them to learn each other’s different perspectives and discover the magic and creativity that can result from their connection. 

Zizi Majid is a playwright whose plays advocate for a shared humanity. Her play How to Gild An Eagle was a finalist for the Columbia@Roundabout New Play Reading Series, as well as a semi-finalist for the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference. Majid was a fellow of WP Theatre's Lab 2020-2022. She presented her play, They Came In The Night, at the 2022 Pipeline Festival. Other plays include Return to Fall (finalist, Blue Ink Playwriting Award; semi-finalist, the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference; semi-finalist, Bay Area Playwrights Festival); Cost (Climate Change Theatre Action Commission 2021); Being in Time (International Human Rights Arts Festival 2019); How Did the Cat Get So Fat? (nominated Best Play, Life! Theatre Awards, Singapore); Yusof (festival commission, Pesta Raya, Singapore). For five years, Majid was the artistic director of Teater Ekamatra (Singapore). Most recently, she spent summer 2022 developing her play, To Raqqa with Love, at Catwalk Art Residency. 

Julián Mesri is a New York-based Argentinean-American writer and composer who creates multilingual plays and musicals that bridge cultures and styles in the US and worldwide. He is a 2020-2023 Public Theater Emerging Writers Group member and a recipient of a 2020-2021 Ensemble Studio Theater/Sloan Commission. Recent productions include Immersion (Ingenio Festival at Milagro Theater, BAPF semi-finalist), The Gauchos Americanos (Teatro Extranjero, Buenos Aires), and the new musical Telo, presented in May 2022. Mesri’s other work includes: music direction and arrangement for Songs About Trains with Radical Evolution, music composition for the Public Theater Mobile Unit’s presentation of Pablo Neruda’s Romeo y Julieta, and development of a musical for young audiences, The Adventures of Snow White. Mesri has been an Emerging Artist of Color Fellow at NYTW, a Van Lier Fellow at Repertorio Español, and the recipient of an ASCAP Scholarship. His adaptation of Fuenteovejuna received the HOLA Outstanding production award.