mid-career & established playwrights residency

The 3 months Mid-Career & Established Playwrights Residency is designed to support rising playwrights by providing creative space, rehearsal and performance space, marketing support, professional mentorship from dramaturgs and directors, access to community partnerships and workshops, and a platform for creating and producing innovative work.

In addition, this residency is designed to cater to each individual artist’s needs and help further their creative process. The playwright must create a new work or reimagine an old work in a new way as a theatre piece while in residency.

Program applications are evaluated based on an artist’s demonstration of the following 5 pillars:

  1. Experimentation – Does the artist’s practice display innovation, and openness to new ideas, perspectives, and techniques?

  2. Responsiveness – Is the artist’s work relevant, topical, and in dialogue with issues of contemporary interest?

  3. Balance – Does the artist think holistically about the relationship between art and life?

  4. Community Engagement – Does the artist demonstrate a willingness and aptitude for significant give-and-take exchange among colleagues and audience?

  5. Potential Impact – How does the artist articulate the impact of access to their artistic career?

we are looking for writers who:

  1. Have been writing for more than 3 years (Playwrights, Novelists, Screenwriters, etc) and want to write for stage

  2. Are committed to incubating a new work

  3. Have written a complete work (short or full-length form)

  4. Interested in presenting their work at a final staged reading at the end of the residency

  5. Playwrights local to Africa (Please note that we have received multiple applications from outside Uganda and starting with the 2025 Residency, we have decided to start accepting applications from all African countries as long as the playwright meets their own travel and accommodation costs during the residency)