Martyna Majok has scored the 2015-16 PoNY Fellowship, the hefty grant for early-career playwrights that comes with a one-year residency in a midtown New York City apartment.
Valued at more than $100,000, the eight-year-old PoNY Fellowship — handed out every year by new-work development nonprofit the Lark and Playwrights of New York — has a strong track record of identifying rising talent. MacArthur genius grant winner Samuel D. Hunter (“The Whale”), Katori Hall (“The Mountaintop”) and Dominique Morisseau are among the scribes singled out early in their careers by the PoNY.
Born in Poland and raised in New Jersey and Chicago, Majok has written plays including “Mouse in a Jar” and “Ironbound” and is affiliated with Ensemble Studio Theater’s Youngblood and Ars Nova, among other stage organizations. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, she’s now at work on a musical about Chernobyl for the Foundry Theater.
Along with a year in a paid-for apartment, the PoNY fellowship also provides three years of health insurance and a living stipend — boons for emerging playwrights with little hope of earning sustainable income from writing alone — as well as artistic support at the Lark from writers including Arthur Kopit, David Henry Hwang and Theresa Rebeck.
