Thank you to all who attended the 2024 New York Independent Theater Awards Ceremony

Mon. Sept. 9th, 2024 at BAH!

To view the full ceremony, click the button above to go to the YouTube feed. The feed begins as soon as the doors opened. Advance the YouTube video about 1 hour for the start of the ceremony.

Every year, our Honorary Awards Committee accepts open submissions for our Honorary Awards from YOU, the Indie Theater community. Once the community has made their nominations and submissions close, a select panel of your peers reviews the nominations and conducts an anonymous vote to determine the Award Recipients. Nominees may be a person or company you have worked with or admire. Awards Categories are: The Caffe Cino Award, The Ellen Stewart Award, The (NEW) Everett Quinton Award, The Artistic Achievement Award, The Outstanding Stage Manager Award and The Indie Theater Champion Award.

This year’s Award recipients were be celebrated at the 2024 New York Independent Theater Awards Ceremony on September 9th. You can read more about them below!

The 2024 NYIT Honorary Award Recipients

The Everett Quinton Award: Kevin R. Free

The Everett Quinton Award, named in honor of the legendary theater maker and leader of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company Everett Quinton, the VERY FIRST RECIPIENT of this new award, will be presented to Kevin R. Free for his fierce commitment to the radical spirit of The Ridiculous. Kevin is a multidisciplinary artist whose work as an actor and writer has been showcased and developed in many places, including the Moth Radio Hour,The New Black Fest, The Blackboard Reading Series, the Estrogenius Festival, the New York International Fringe Festival, and The Fire This Time Festival. His full-length plays include Face Value (Henry Street Settlement Playwrights' Project Grant); A Raisin in the Salad; Black Plays for White People (FringeNYC; New Black Fest Fellow; Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights' Conference Semifinalist); The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, or TRIPLE-CONSCIOUSNESS (The Fire This Time Festival), and Night of the Living N-Word!! (Best Overall Production; FringeNYC, 2016). His most recent play, Swimming Uphill, written for André De Shields, was just given a workshop as part of the Historic Apollo Theatre's New Works Lab. As an actor, he has performed in commercials, audio books (honored in 2023 with the Golden Voice Award from AudioFile Magazine for his lifetime achievement in this arena), podcasts, TV and Film and onstage, both regionally and off-Broadway.. He has directed regionally at Portland Stage, Mile Square Theatre, UNLV, Colby College and Bates College. Later this season, he will direct The Yellow Stocking Play, a world premiere musical by DW Gregory and Sarah and Steven Knapp-Alper and Tiny Beautiful Things at Mile Square Theatre in Hoboken, where he is now Artistic Director; and then at Alabama Shakespeare Festival he will direct the world premiere of Donnetta Lavinia Grays’s Kudzu Calling. From 2012-2016 he was the Producing Artistic Director of the Obie Award-winning Fire This Time Festival (and produced early works by Jordan E. Cooper, Adrienne Dawes, Eliana Pipes, and Tracey Conyer Lee, to name a few). More at www.kevinrfree.com and on IG @kevinrfree

The Caffe Cino Award: Houses on the Moon

The Caffe Cino Award, named in honor of the legendary Caffe Cino, is presented to an Independent/Off-Off-Broadway theatre company that consistently produces outstanding work that speaks to its community. This year’s recipient, Houses on the Moon, is a shining example of this. Houses on the Moon (HOTM) Theater Company was founded in 2001 with a mission to dispel ignorance and isolation through the theatrical amplification of unheard voices. Through creative workshops, original performances, post-show conversations, and accessible ticketing, HOTM unites communities through the public sharing of untold stories. For over 20 years, HOTM has been a home for unheard stories. Each of our 12 original plays was born from an urgent social need, and began through partnerships with community organizations. Past projects illuminate urgent stories from LGBTQ+ families, undocumented youth, people living in public housing, individuals impacted by gun violence and mass incarceration, and more. Our partners have included the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), the Fortune Society, Save Our Streets, the Libertas Center for Human Rights, and many more. HOTM’s development process includes community engagement, first-person storytelling workshops, and interviews. Through this process, we create innovative, bold and theatrical work that is inclusive, collaborative and authentically reflective of previously unheard voices. HOTM’s work has been produced internationally and in 17 US states, as well as Off-Broadway at New York Theater Workshop, Lucille Lortel, Theatre Row Theatres, 59E59 St. Theatres, Dixon Place and more. Our work has toured schools (University of Colorado, UT Austin, New England Law, Arizona State, NYU Law), hospitals (Elmhurst Hospital, Metropolitan Hospital Center, Mt. Sinai), national festivals and conferences (InterNational Prisoners Family Conference, National Gay and Lesbian Theatre Festival). housesonthemoon.org @housesonthemoon

The Artistic Achievement Award: Theresa Linnihan

The Artistic Achievement Award is presented to artists who have made a significant artistic contribution to the Off-Off-Broadway community. This year we recognize Theresa Linnihan. A child of the prairie, Theresa apprenticed with The Minneapolis Childrens Theater for several years. At nineteen she moved to a small art colony 40 miles from the Canadian border and accepted the role of Artistic Director in the Grand Marais Playhouse. Seven years later she was fired for being "too avant-garde." She moved east to Newburyport MA where she founded Theater in the Open, a
company of all ages creating fresh versions of myths and fairy tales as well as original plays. Seven years into this endeavour, Theresa was granted a residency in Maudslay State Park, a newly acquired estate designated to be a park for the arts. Cruising the Green Mountains of Vermont to ponder all she didn't know about outdoor performance, Theresa stumbled into Bread and Puppet and a long and marvelous collaboration in which she embraced the magic and power of puppetry. She also made an alliance with The Puppeteers Cooperative in Boston. In her 16 years steering TITO, the theatre produced annually a season of four plays as well as an Arts Festival and Summer Workshop for young people. They toured New England and Europe until, in 1993 Theresa passed the torch to a generation raised in TITO and returned to Minneapolis where she worked for Dudley Riggs Brave New Workshop, satirizing the news of the day through original songs, sketches and improvisation. Three years later she moved with her partner, George Konnoff, to Brooklyn. She found her way to Henry Street Settlement's Theater and a network of Arts and Education programs that took her to schools in all five boroughs. In 1997 she auditioned for The Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater and began an enduring journey of challenging roles, design opportunities, tours to Korea, Turkey, Pakistan and The Czech Republic in the position of associate director with CAMT. In this same stretch of 30 years Theresa has also produced and performed with The Puppeteers Cooperative and in 2004, due to a thriving relationship with Prospect Park, the co-op established The New York Puppet Library in the Civil War Monument at Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn. This library, funded by The Brooklyn Arts Council, offered stirring and playful imagery free of charge to a host of community events and art projects throughout NYC and beyond. With enthusiastic help from CAMT, a small performance space was created in the transom of the monument for emerging artists in theater, puppetry and music. In 2016, her family called Theresa back to Minnesota where she joined Heart of the Beast, an internationally acclaimed puppet and mask theater and she was hired by a sister theater, Barebones Puppets. These beloved companies produce vivid pageants drawn from community discussions of how our fears and fury can be transcended and reflected even while Covid raged and the murder of George Floyd ignited a global protest. Since 2022 Theresa has returned at the beckoning of theatrical allies to NYC where she continues to serve CAMT, The Puppeteers Cooperative and an array of community agencies, schools and fellow theater artists.

The Indie Theater Champion Award: Rev. Micah Bucey

The Indie Theater Champion Award is given to an individual, group, or business that advanced the Indie theater community through positive social justice actions during the past year. This year’s Champion is Rev. Micah Bucey for continuous support of the bodies and spirits of New York City’s independent theater artists. Micah is a firebrand faith leader, flaming fairy, and fawning fan, who serves as Senior Minister at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, a community committed to curiously seeking the intersections between expansive spirituality, radical social justice, and uncensored creative expression.   At Judson, Rev. Bucey developed and continues to oversee “Judson Arts,” which has commissioned, presented, produced, and promoted the creative output of thousands of poets, playwrights, composers, musicians, actors, dancers, choreographers, painters, photographers, sculptors, and many others, upholding the belief that artists have the potential to serve as society’s modern-day prophets. Rev. Bucey also serves as the Artistic Director for “Judson Commons,” the secular justice and arts hub housed within Judson, and is the author of The Book of Tiny Prayer, available from Fordham University Press. @revmicahb

The Ellen Stewart Award: The Muse Project

The Ellen Stewart Award, named in honor of LaMaMa's Ellen Stewart, is presented to an individual or organization demonstrating a significant contribution to the Independent/ Off-Off-Broadway community through service, support and leadership. This year’s award recognizes The Muse Project. The Muse Project is an experimental initiative that centers women theater actors. The initiative shifts the theater paradigm through the empowerment of women stage actors as creators, collaborators, and content generators. Muses have included an array of accomplished and burgeoning actresses, including the late Lynn Cohen, Florencia Lozano, Déa Julien, Vanessa Aspillaga, Kyra Miller, Jessica Frances Dukes, Jocelyn Kuritsky (Artistic Director), and more. Partnerships with various celebrated New York theater companies to incubate the work have included New Georges, The New Group, Abingdon Theatre Company, The Tank, The Flea Theater, The PIT, Theaterlab, & Torn Page. The Project has a kind of nimble, shape-shifting nomadic spirit that can affect many — artists and audiences alike, in small and large(er) settings, in person and online. The organization also facilitates discussion and highlights the varied and interesting careers of many women stage actors. themuseprojectnyc.com instagram.com/themuseprojectnyc

The Outstanding Stage Manager Award: Berit Johnson

The Outstanding Stage Manager Award honors the living link between artistic conception/inspiration and practical implementation - stage managers. Our 2024 Outstanding Stage Manager is Berit Johnson. Berit exemplifies the classic traits of a good stage manager and add their own style that meshes so well with the Indie Theatre style, which isn’t surprising, since Berit has been working in Indie Theater in NYC since 1996 as a stage manager and prop designer.  They are a member of Untitled Theater Company #61, and co-director of Gemini CollisionWorks with their partner, Ian W. Hill. They are also the showrunner and head writer for GCW’s sci-fi audio sitcom, Life with Althaar, which is available wherever podcasts are streamed.