Sean McCord, who is pursuing his M.F.A. in the Playwright’s Lab at Hollins University, and Sarah Cosgrove-Gaumond, who completed her graduate degree in playwriting at Hollins this year, have been honored with invitations this summer to the Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive.
Presented by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF), the program welcomes university students, faculty, and emerging professionals from across the country. They engage in rigorous writing workshops and discussions of the art, craft, and business of playwriting led by Gary Garrison, an award-winning playwright, author, and educator who has served as executive director of creative affairs for the Dramatist Guild of America. A wide range of distinguished artists augment the program.
In addition, participants will be able to attend breakout sessions that address specific opportunities and challenges for affinity and identity groups, and playwrights of color, each led by a distinguished mentor.
McCord was drawn to playwriting after getting involved with local theatre in Charlottesville. “I discovered a writing group there, the LiveArts Playwrights Lab,” he recalled in a 2019 interview with WVTF Public Radio. “And, every summer they would put on a show of shorts that they had written. So, I went to that show and oh, wow, you mean you can just like write a play and get together with friends and they will put it on? So, I joined and started writing short plays and after that I was kind of hooked.”
McCord went on to enroll in the graduate program in playwriting at Hollins and has had plays produced in Virginia, Kentucky, Colorado, California, South Carolina, and Stuttgart, Germany. His first full-length play, Moving, won the 2019 Kennedy Center National Partners of the American Theatre Playwriting Award.
Cosgrove-Gaumond completed her M.F.A. this year and is enjoying her second invitation to the Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive; she attended the program in 2018. Her plays Unspoken and North Wind were selected for the Hollins Playwrights’ Festival of New Works in 2018 and 2019, respectively. Another play, I Lived to Tell, was one of three Hollins student-written plays invited to the KCACTF regional festival last year and was nominated for the organization’s national festival. It will be produced as part of the Hollins-Mill Mountain Winter Festival of New Works this January.
Other career highlights include writing and performing It Would Have to be a Girl at the Future is Female Festival at Chicago Dramatists, and You’d be So Much Prettier If You as part of the Women’s Performance Workshop at the Strand Theater in Baltimore.
“My goal is to create a theatrical experience that raises questions, challenges the status quo, and amplifies the voices of the underserved,” she notes on her website.
The Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive takes place virtually July 14-17 and 21-24.
