Onyekachi Iwu, a Nigerian American playwright and director who was associate director on Stereophonic from Playwrights Horizons to Broadway, is the 2026-2027 recipient of the Vineyard Theatre’s Paula Vogel Playwriting Award.
The Vineyard Theatre named her on October 14. Given each year to a writer early in their career, the award brings a cash prize and a year-long residency at the Union Square company to develop new work. Iwu receives it at the Vineyard’s annual Emerging Artists Celebration on Monday, December 7, a donor-only evening hosted by the Vineyard Theatre Council.
Iwu comes from Nashville, Tennessee. Born to a Nigerian father and an American mother from Alabama, she draws on the rituals and traditions of both Nigeria and the Deep South, and her plays keep returning to love, sisterhood, violence and transformation. She was one of the founding members of the Cherry Lane Theatre Playwrights Collective, a nine-month development program led by Pulitzer winner Annie Baker, and of the 2020-2022 American Theatre Group Playlab. Her Southern horror play the magical south was a finalist for the Drama League Beatrice Terry Residency, the Leah Ryan Fund for Emerging Women Writers, the Crossroads Diverse Voices Playwriting Initiative and the UCROSS + The Blank Theatre’s Future of Playwriting Prize.
She directs as well. A member of the WP Theater Directing Lab from 2022 to 2024, she has developed new work with National Black Theatre, MCC Theater, New Dramatists, Mercury Store, the Public Theater and The Civilians. On Daniel Aukin’s Tony-winning production of Stereophonic she was associate director at Playwrights Horizons, on Broadway and on the first national tour. She held the same post on Katie Posner’s Strategic Love Play at the Minetta Lane Theatre, and assisted Anne Kauffman on The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and on Broadway.
The prize marks a long relationship. The Vineyard premiered Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive in 1997, directed by Mark Brokaw, and the play went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. Brokaw also directed her The Long Christmas Ride Home there in 2001, and the company’s production of Indecent moved to Broadway in 2017, giving Vogel her Broadway debut and two Tony Awards. Past winners include Tarell Alvin McCraney (2008), Rajiv Joseph (2009), Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (2011), Clare Barron (2014), Antoinette Nwandu (2017), Jeremy O. Harris (2018), Ryan J. Haddad (2021) and, most recently, Ro Reddick (2026). The award is funded by The Tournesol Project.
Iwu joins two artists already in residence this season: Ato Blankson-Wood, the 2025-2027 Colman Domingo Award recipient, and Keenan Tyler Oliphant, who holds the 2025-2027 Susan Stroman Directing Award. Earlier this month the company and Daryl Roth lined up The Goldsmith and The Road to Jerusalem for Mondays at the DR2.
