Several alumni, past faculty, fellows and guest artists in the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Theater & Music Theater have earned 2026 Obie Awards for their work in theaters Off- and Off-Off-Broadway:
- Recently named 2026-27 Hodder Fellow nazareth hassan won the Obie Award for Outstanding New Play for Bowl EP
- Princeton alum and recent guest artist abigail jean-baptiste ’18 won an Obie Award for her directing work on Chiaroscuro. She recently returned to campus to direct Ti-Jean and His Brothers in the Program in Theater & Music Theater’s 2024-25 season.
- Past Lecturer in Theater, 2017-19 Princeton Arts Fellow, and Princeton alum David Bengali ’04 won an Obie Award for Sustained Achievement in Design for his video work for the projects We Live in Cairo, Joy, and Lights Out: Nat “King” Cole. At the Lewis Center he has taught projection design workshops, the course “Storytelling with Technology for Performance,” and served as projection consultant for Felon: An American Washi Tale in the Lewis Center’s 2023-24 season.
- Past theater lecturer Sam Pinkleton won an Obie Award for Directing for ta-da! and Can I Be Frank?. He taught the fall 2020 course “Theater Rehearsal and Performance,” which innovatively investigated and created short-form music-driven content for virtual audiences during the Covid-19 pandemic.
- 2019-20 Hearst Choreographers-in-Residence Urban Bush Women won a special Obie theater grant. Members of the legendary Urban Bush Women re-staged the company’s Women’s Resistance for student dancers in the 2021 Princeton Dance Festival.
In addition, past 2023-24 Hodder Fellow Modesto “Flako” Jimenez served on this year’s judging panel.
The Obie Awards are annually presented by The American Theatre Wing and announced online without a formal ceremony. Instead, financial grants are given to each of the winners; this year, the grants total more than $250,000. Read the full list of Obie Award winners
Featured Image: Princeton alumna abigail jean-baptiste ’18 directs Ti Jean and His Brothers by Derek Walcott on April 10, 2025, in the Wallace Theater. Photo by Frank Wojciechowski
