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Commencement

Honorary Degree: Lynn Nottage

Playwright and screenwriter was the first woman in history to win two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama.

Lynn Nottage’s plays have been produced widely in the United States and throughout the world.

Her plays include Floyd’s, Sweat, Mlima’s Tale, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, Ruined, Intimate Apparel, Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Las Meninas, Mud, River, Stone, Por’knockers and POOF!.

Musical librettos include The Secret Life of Bees and MJ (Fall 2021). She has also developed This is Reading, a performance installation in Reading, Pennsylvania.

Nottage is still the only woman in history to win two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama, for Ruined in 2009 and Sweat in 2017.

She’s also the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, numerous awards including OBIE, Drama Desk, and Lucille Lortel awards, and in 2017 the Tony Award for Best Play and the Evening Standard Theatre Award (the Tony equivalent in the UK) in 2019 for her play Sweat. TIME magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2019.

Nottage graduated from Brown University and The Yale School of Drama and is an Associate Professor at Columbia University School of the Arts.