English Professor Awarded Kennedy Center Grant
Posted on Thursday, February 11, 2010
Dr. Andrew Ade, Westminster College associate professor of English, was awarded one of six 2009 Kennedy Center National Teaching Artist Grants.
Ade was nominated by the executive committee of the Region II Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF) in October. Grants were awarded by a panel of current and past members of the KCACTF national committee and a non-academic professional, based on the candidates' achievements as teaching artists and their record of contribution to KCACTF programming
The $2,000 grant will be used toward a professional development activity in theatre education. Ade was the only one of the honorees to receive the grant for playwriting; the others were for actor training and directing.
Ade will apply the grant to a residency in a writers' colony this summer, where he will finish the second of his two plays on African themes and draft two full-length plays.
"This award was a surprise, as I hadn't pursued it at all," Ade said. "I've never had the opportunity for concentrated writing experience in a facility that caters to just that, but this grant makes it possible."
The announcement of the grant awards will appear in the March issue of American Theatre magazine, the leading national publication in theatre.
Ade's A Question of Taste first appeared at the Pittsburgh Playwrights Theater Company's 2007 Theater Festival in Black & White, where it won four awards, including Best Play, and recently won the 2009 Arts & Letters Prize in Drama.
Ade, who joined the Westminster faculty in 2003, earned an undergraduate degree from Northwestern University and a master's and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Contact Ade at (724) 946-7349 or e-mail adeaw@westminster.edu for additional information. Visit http://www.kcactf.org/ for additional information about the grant program.
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