Lloyd Richards with his Tony Award for Best Direction for Fences, 1987 PHOTO c/o the Lloyd Richards Estate (Lloyd Richards Papers, Yale University).
The Lloyd Richards New Futures Residency is a yearlong residency for mid-career directors and choreographers who are interested in institutional leadership. It is named after Lloyd Richards, a legendary leader of the American Theatre who directed some of the most important plays on Black life of the 20th century.
The goals of this residency are to help develop artists to become artistic leaders in the American Theatre and support artists who are illuminating Black cultural experiences on stage. This residency provides unique exposure to the responsibilities of being an Artistic Director and the internal structure and workings of a theatrical institution by forging or deepening a relationship between the recipient artist and artistic leader. The vision is to increase access, opportunities, and pathways to institutional leadership for mid-career directors and choreographers who are thinking strategically about how their work can increase Black cultural representation on stage within their local community and/or the industry at large.
Each Resident Artist in the program receives a $40,000 grant along with an additional $10,000 of assistance that can go towards housing, travel, and health insurance. The Resident Artist is also guaranteed the opportunity to direct or choreograph a production at the Host Theatre within three years of the residency.
New to the 2024-2025 cycle of the residency, the application process will take place in two rounds. For the first round, artists will apply individually to the program. The Richards Residency committee will select the top four candidates to move onto the second round. In the second round, the Resident Artist finalists will apply with an artistic leader at a theatre that would serve as the Mentor and Host Theatre for the Resident Artist. One Resident and Mentor/Host Theatre pair will be selected.
Evaluation Criteria: Applications will be evaluated based on the clear articulation of alignment with the goals of the program, timing as a mid-career artist for this type of opportunity, and clear sense of artistic voice as well.
The 2025 Resident Artist application is now open and due December 9, 2024. You can preview questions and apply here. Any questions regarding the residency may be answered on our FAQ page here.
Additionally, there was a webinar about the Residency on October 23rd. You can watch the webinar recording here.
Resident Artist applicants are not required to be connected with a Host Theatre/Mentor in order to apply. If helpful though, below is what we believe a well-suited partnership would look like.
An ideal partnership includes the following:
Kendra Ware, 2022 Resident Artist (left) with Robert Barry Fleming mentor and Actors Theatre Executive Artistic Director (right) with Dani Barlow, SDCF Foundation Director (center) at opening for Party People at Actors Theatre.
- Provide access to the Resident Artist to learn the inner workings of a theatre institution
- Both allow the artist to learn about artistic leadership and allow them to provide their own knowledge to the artistic staff at the organization so that both can learn grow – it should be a mutually beneficial partnership
- Collaborate on significant projects during the year of the residency
- Allow the artist to explore their artistry through a workshop or production within the three years after the residency is completed – must be on an SDC contract – we will prioritize organizations that provide a full production to the Resident Artist as an offering, but a workshop production will still be eligible and considered if that is in the best interest of the artist
- The Mentor at the Host Theatre must be in the artistic department of a theatre organization, and they must be an SDC Member
- The Resident Artist does not need to be an SDC Member
- In developing the Resident Artist’s time, there should be some flexibility for the residency since it was designed for mid-career artists, and the Resident Artist will likely have other artistic and/or personal obligations throughout the year of their residency. We understand that some portion of this residency may take place virtually, depending on the circumstances of a theatre’s given region.
2025 Lloyd Richards New Futures Residency Timeline
- Week of October 7th: Resident Artist applications open
- Monday, December 9th, 2024: Resident Artists applications close
- January 2025: Resident Artists finalists notified
- January 2025: Internal Resident Artist finalists and host theatre application process begins
- April 2025: Lloyd Richards Resident Artist and host theatre selected
- By November 2025: Richards Residency has begun
The Lloyd Richards New Futures Residency launched in 2020. Learn more about the artists by clicking the images below.
About Lloyd Richards:
David Cogan, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Lloyd Richards, Philip Rose and Sidney Poitier in studio portrait from the original 1959 Broadway production of A Raisin in the Sun courtesy of the New York Public Library.
The New Futures Residency is named for Lloyd Richards, whose career blazed a trail through our industry. Starting as an actor in 1940s New York, in 1956, Sidney Poitier arranged an interview for Richards with producers to direct Lorraine Hansberry’s new play A Raisin in the Sun. Richards’ work on the production garnered his first of five Tony nominations for Best Direction of a Play; he later won the award in 1987 for his work on Fences. Richards led the National Playwrights Conference (NPC) at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center for more than 30 years, developing work with hundreds of playwrights. From 1979-91, he was Artistic Director of Yale Repertory Theatre and Dean of the Yale School of Drama.
Richards was the first Black director to be nominated for and then to win the Tony Award for Best Direction. Aside from his first nomination for Raisin in the Sun, the other four honored his work directing August Wilson’s plays on Broadway. Richards’ collaborations with Hansberry and Wilson sustained his deepest beliefs about our industry: “We must each bring the wonder of our particular cultural heritage to the context of the here and the now. That is American Theatre—theatre which reaches into the ethnic memory of each of us and is informed by its wisdom, form, and artistry, and brings that to the context ‘now,’ where we all dwell, and informs the now, which provokes and enriches us all.”
In addition to his artistic accolades, Richards was a staunch advocate for artists’ rights as workers. A founding member of SDC, Richards served as president from 1970 to 1980. He received the National Medal of Arts in 1993; he died in 2006.
For Lloyd Richards’ full biography, click here.
Support for the Residency:
SDCF has received a $150K Grant from The Charles and Lucille King Family Foundation. Please click here to read about the announcement.
The 2025 Lloyd Richards New Futures Residency is made possible with support from The Diana King Memorial Fund presented by The Charles and Lucille King Family Foundation, the Miranda Family Fund, Concord Theatricals, and support through the SDCF fellowship funds named for Shepard and Mildred Traube and Sir John Gielgud, and many generous individuals.
