Professor Lynn Nottage Receives 2026 Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award
Professor of Playwriting and two time Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright Lynn Nottage has been selected as a recipient of the 2025-2026 Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award. Started in 2005 by a gift from the late University Trustee Gerry Lenfest, the annual award “recognizes faculty excellence in teaching, research, and mentorship across the Arts and Sciences.” According to the Executive Committee of Arts of Science, the body responsible for determining each year’s recipients, “It is the highest honor we bestow upon individual faculty.” The Executive Committee includes the Dean and Executive Vice President of Arts and Sciences, the Dean of Columbia College, and the Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award serves as a reminder and representation of the ethos of Columbia’s faculty: individuals who uphold rigorous scholastic standards and show a great commitment to their students, all while championing the creative energy needed to push the arts and sciences towards innovation.
Nottage is a celebrated American playwright and screenwriter whose works have been produced throughout the United States and abroad and include Clyde’s (Tony Nomination), MJ the Musical (Tony Nomination), Intimate Apparel the Opera (Drama Desk Nomination), Sweat (Pulitzer Prize, Obie Award, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize), and Ruined. Nottage serves as an artist-in-redience at the Park Avenue Armory and the co-founder of the production company Market Road Films. She’s developed original projects for HBO, Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, and Showtime and serves as a writer and producer on the Netflix adaptation of Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It. Nottage's most recent honors include Induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the PEN/Laura Pels Master Playwright Award, and The MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship. Nottage also remains the only woman to have won the Pulitzer twice.
The selection committee of the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award chose Nottage for “[her] genre-defying plays of vital significance to American theatre that have been recognized by the world’s most prestigious honors, her transformational role as a teacher of playwriting through her signature course on theatre and American Spectacle, and her invaluable support to students by serving as a bridge in their transition from the academy to the profession.”
“I'm beyond delighted and honored to be selected for the Lenfest Distinguished Teaching Award," says Nottage, "and so appreciate being recognized for doing something that brings me joy. As a theatermaker I consider teaching at Columbia to be a vital part of my creative practice, and foundational to who I am as an artist."
The Executive Committee called for nominations in the Fall 2025 and selected finalists in early 2026. In addition to professional recognition, the award supplies an unrestricted stipend for a period of three years. Past recipients of these awards include Professor of Theatre and head of the Theatre Directing Concentration, Anne Bogart, who received the award for the 2023-2024 school year.