Ariel Stess ’08 Wins the Yale Drama Series Award for 2025

Bard alum and Obie Award–winning playwright Ariel Stess ’08 has won the Yale Drama Series Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious playwriting awards, for her play, KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA. Stess will be honored with a staged reading of her winning play at Yale Schwarzman Center, conferral of the $10,000 David Charles Horn Prize, and publication of her play by Yale University Press. KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA, which won a 2025 Obie Award for playwriting, intertwines the lives of four women from different generations and social strata in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Stess’s play was selected by Pulitzer and Tony Prize–winning playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who stated, “Stess’s work stood out for the line-by-line sparkle and polish of its composition and the playwright’s cool confidence in the power of well-crafted language alone to transport an audience to and through the vast inner wilds of character . . . This is dramatic portraiture of the highest order.”

Post Date: 06-03-2025