This is a list of the playwrights most recently commissioned under The Sloan Initiative, along with a description of their work:

SONALI BHATTACHARYYA (FY24) – Imprinting the Raj

A play exploring the little-known story of the invention of fingerprinting in British-occupied India and examining debunked ideas of race that continue to shape our world. Photo by Helen Murray.

ZACHARIAH EZER (FY24) – Natural Language   

A Black-owned start-up attempting to create the first Large Language Model fluent in African-American Vernacular English is bought out by a white-owned firm for digital influencers, in this play exploring the relationship between contemporary technology and the legacy of slavery.

BETH HYLAND (FY24) – Skinniest

A play about the American weight loss industry that investigates GLP-1 drugs from a human perspective and explores the way a medical innovation can upend personal lives and cultural understandings.

AURORA REAL DE ASUA (FY24) – Greensward!

A play inspired by the life of Frederick Law Olmsted, founder of landscape architecture, and the creation and development of Central Park. Photo by Janna Giacoppo.

RUBY THOMAS (FY24) – Unthinkable

A forensic psychiatrist attempts to scientifically quantify violent behavior in this play examining the blurry intersection of science, morality, and law.

This is a list of all playwrights commissioned under The Sloan Initiative in previous years, along with a description of their work:

PRESTON MAX ALLEN (FY23) – New Generation
When Kyle, a trans man, enters a life-changing co-parenting relationship with his late wife’s best friend, a deeply human, darkly comedic story unfolds which authentically re-centers the conversation of trans parenthood around scientific facts and complex trans perspectives.

AMY BERRYMAN (FY23) –  God’s Flesh
Following two scientists overseeing a trial for psilocybin therapy, a thrilling, emotional look into the groundbreaking work being achieved in the field of psychedelic treatment and the connection between spirituality and science.

SHAYOK MISHA CHOWDHURY (FY23) – For External Use Only
Through an intimate story about a woman caught between cultures trying to make sense of a senseless tragedy, a play exploring the public health debate around mustard oil, and the ways in which scientific conclusions and policies can differ between nations and institutions.

SAM GRABINER (FY23) – Untitled
A small community in Norfolk, England gathers to grapple with the bodies and bones of the long-deceased resurfacing in their cemetery as climate change causes soil composition changes. With a problem that is at once local and global; spiritual and scientific; modern and ancient, this story engages with the profound implications of our scientific reality.

KEIKO GREEN (FY23) – Nuclear
Spanning two decades and multiple cities across the globe, Nuclear is a story of two very different people and how they handle working in the fraught yet vital field of nuclear power.

ALEX LIN (FY23) – Let’s Ride
A rideshare driver undertakes a quest to get to the bottom of his unjust firing, kicking off an investigation into the power of AI and automation in algorithms and how they shape our world.

YILONG LIU (FY23) – Untitled
A play about the life of the young Chinese woman who was the world’s first genome-edited baby. Through a story that intertwines Chinese mythology with science, the play explores individual sacrifices for the sake of medical achievement and gives humanity to the lives that are often reduced to data and papers.

NKENNA AKUNNA (FY22) – Pure Water
Through the science and history of oil contaminated waters, Pure Water explores wealth, access, and the neo-colonial legacy of climate catastrophe in the Global South and highlights how the implications – and manipulation – of scientific research in the US goes far beyond its borders.

LIZA BIRKENMEIER & ZACK ZADEK (FY22) – Untitled
Through the lens of two researchers, a century apart in their work in theoretical physics, this musical highlights how 100 years of scientific determination, inventiveness, and collaboration can help illuminate the music of the cosmos.

ALEXA DERMAN (FY22) – Permanently, Painlessly
Exploring gender, beauty, and fraud, a campy queer tragedy that excavates a secret history of body hair and explores the lengths women will go to feel beautiful.

DYLAN GUERRA (FY22) – The Astronomers
A play set at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, as American astrophysicist Frank Drake and others strive to craft the Arecibo Message to be sent into space.

DANIELLE STAGGER (FY22) – Out There
A scientific power couple – one the showrunner of a popular nature documentary series, the other a leading primatologist – clash over an unprecedented recording of a Bonobo killing one of their own kind and its implications for the human world.

J . Nicole Brooks (FY21) – Children Who Come and Go
A story mosaic that spotlights residents of a rural town as they battle to remove the remnants of millions of gallons of toxic sludge—replete with arsenic, mercury, and human waste—that leaked into their drinking water following a decades-old accident.

Diane Exavier (FY21) – In the Mouth of the Sun
Following a family of Black winemakers in Missouri, the play explores the science of wine-making, global viticulture, and the impact of climate change on the wine industry.

Franky D. Gonzalez (FY21) – Points of Entry
Chronicling the infamous legacy of venereal disease expert Dr. John Charles Cutler, Points of Entry lays bare the terrible human cost of the unethical methods of experimentation used in his decades-long study of reproductive health.

Charlie Oh (FY21) – The Disruptors
In this fast-paced examination of the decline of techno-utopianism, Caroline, a disgraced low-level security analyst for Big Tech, is forced to reckon with her culpability within a system of technology, surveillance, and power.

Kristin Slaney (FY21) – The Incubator Doctor
Inspired by the true story of Martin Couney’s popularization of the infant incubator for premature babies—at a sideshow attraction on Coney Island, no less—The Incubator Doctor chronicles the incredible origins of the medical practices we find in neonatal intensive care units to this day.

Else Went (FY21) – An Oxford Man
A play dramatizing the life and times of Laurence Michael Dillon, a British physician and the first trans man to undergo gender affirmation surgery in the early twentieth century.

Kate Attwell (FY20) – Meitnerium
A play exploring the work of Austrian-Swedish physicist Lise Meitner, nuclear fission, and the unstoppable string of action around the world triggered by this previously unthinkable discovery.

Mia Chung (FY20) – Lysenko
A play about the rise of Lysenko and the Soviet Union’s embrace of pseudoscientific theories of agrobiology for three decades.

Noah Diaz (FY20) – Untitled
A play exploring the cultural rift within the deaf community around the debate between sign language and cochlear implants.

Julia Izumi (FY20) – Terry
A chronicle of the life of award-winning immunologist Teruko Ishizaka, who discovered the antibody responsible for triggering histamine-induced allergies while working alongside her husband, Dr. Kimishige Ishizaka, in 1966.

Ife Olujobi (FY20) – Color Girls
A play about the advent of color television, the “color girls” – young white women who sat for hours in front of cameras during color tests – and this moment’s impact on the way we reproduce (or fail to reproduce) non-white skin tones in media, from the mid-20^th century to the current digital landscape.

Stacey Rose (FY20) – Shanaya the Viable
Charting one family’s difficult journey through the healthcare system in the wake of their young child’s illness, a play that explores the idea of “medical viability” and whether it equates to a life worth living.

Brittany K. Allen (FY19) – Ball Change
Set at New York City’s oldest answering service, the play examines the effect had by changing telecommunications on the ways we live and work.

Eboni Booth (FY19) – Untitled
A play about Tyrone Hayes, an African American biologist hired by an agricultural company to conduct experiments on a popular herbicide, who finds his reputation under attack when his findings are not to the company’s liking.

Nick Gandiello (FY19) – deep/fake/play
A play about the development of ultrarealistic simulated videos, or “deepfakes,” and the increasing elusiveness of such a thing as the truth.

Jessica Huang (FY19) – Mass Extinction! or The Ultimate Reckoning of Georges Cuvier by Volunteer Docent Annie Chung
A retired geological engineer becomes obsessed with Georges Cuvier’s work proving the theory of extinction, seeing a mirror of her own scientific career in both his breakthroughs and his crucial missteps.

Barney Norris (FY19) –The Drowned
A play about aging climate activists in the UK looking back at the work they’ve done and where it’s gotten them today.

Charly Evon Simpson (FY19) – Weathered
A play about the alarmingly high mortality rates for black women during pregnancy and childbirth, due to “weathering” – the physical consequences of accumulated stress resulting from racism. The play follows a scientist whose study of this phenomenon takes on new, personal urgency when she becomes pregnant.

Deborah Stein (FY19) – Motherboard
Inspired by the playwright’s mother, a play about the wife of an engineer on a Vietnam War defense contract. When she signs up for a free coding class, she sets events in motion that will lead her into a whole new life.

Alexis Zegerman (FY19) – The Fever Syndrome
A play about the legacy of a professor who pioneered the test tube baby.

Kevin Armento (FY18) – Hard
A play about the accidental invention of Viagra by two scientists seeking to treat high blood pressure.

Kendall Feaver (FY18) – Yolk
A play that follows a Chinese-American embryologist who has perfected artificial womb technology.

Selina Fillinger (FY18) – The Collapse
A play about a group of undergraduate research assistants tackling Colony Collapse Disorder.

Gracie Gardner (FY18) – The Student from New Jersey
A play about the undergraduate engineering student Diane Hartley and the building of the Citicorp Center.

Max Posner (FY18) – Untitled
A play about evolving medical research on MS and a group of middle-aged women struggling with the disease.

Andrew Thompson (FY18) – One Hundred Oxen
A play set in the world of LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory).

James Anthony Tyler (FY18) – Eunice
A play about Eunice Rivers and her participation in the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.

Nina Braddock (FY17) – Unlucky Number
An examination of the experience of those with OCD.

Stella Feehily (FY17) – The Trouble With Girls
A play about astronomer and astrophysicist Cecilia Payne and her 1925 PhD thesis about the composition of the stars.

Dipika Guha (FY17) – Asilomar
A play exploring the recent history and development of CRISPR.

Alan Harris (FY17) – Gather Itself Up
A play about a young woman and her grandmother, an honored mathematician struggling with Alzheimer’s.

Phillip Howze (FY17) – Untitled Genomics Comedy
A comedy about recent research on genotype data-mining and DNA inheritance in America.

Caroline V. McGraw (FY17) – Counterclockwise
A play about tactile advances in prosthetic technology that follows a nurse in an Ohio suburb who is missing her left arm.

Al Smith (FY17) – Rat
The play follows an Infectious Disease Specialist who supplements his income by giving interviews to sensationalist news organizations that push pseudo-scientific stories.

Celine Song (FY17) – Intelligence
A play about the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence and computer scientist John McCarthy.

Jaclyn Backhaus (FY16) – The Botanists
A play inspired by the true story of the writer’s parents, both botanists.

Christopher Chen (FY16) – The Motion
A play about the ethical debate around scientific testing on animals.

E V Crowe (FY16) – Sounds Like Me
An acoustics engineer obsessively analyzes sound recordings of her own life.

Mansa Ra (FY16) – The Least of These
A play set amid the Flint water crisis.

Ethan Lipton (FY16) – Dan the Man
The life of the Bernoulli family and its several generations of mathematicians.

Jiehae Park (FY16) – Here We Are Here
A play about technologies of connectivity and navigation through three global stories of time, place, memory, and family.

Jen Silverman (FY16) – Regressions
An examination of epigenetics about a group of mothers-to-be.

Clare Barron (FY15) – Things I Used to Know
An archaeological dig through High School Science.

Sarah Burgess (FY15) – The Lines
A play about the complex algorithmic models used in sports gambling.

Jessica Dickey (FY15) – Nan and the Lower Body (The Pap Smear Play)
A young scientist, based on the writer’s grandmother, works with the inventor of the Pap Smear and is diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis.

Deirdre Kinahan (FY15) – Lydia Glynn
The story of a team of Russian scientists who gave their lives to protect what they believed to be the key to the future of mankind, the seed bank of the Vavilov Institute in Leningrad.

Martyna Majok (FY15) – Price
The story of George Price’s tragic attempt to determine if anything can truly be done selflessly.

Jeff Augustin (FY14) – Of Land
A drama about a scientist returning to Haiti, her ancestral home, for the first time and trying to convince her family to plant crops that she believes will lift them out of poverty.

Nell Benjamin (FY14) –Weathersby
A comedy about Lord Waethyr 13th Earl of Weathersby, a recluse and scientist who opens the doors to his estate for the first time.

Halley Feiffer and Joshua Schmidt (FY14) —Lucy the Lying Chimpanzee
A musical about two scientists who raised a chimp like a human being.

Hannie Rayson (FY14) – Fat Institute
A play about a group of food scientists and marketers who work at Snack Corp.

Alexandra Wood (FY14) – Encyclopedie
The play follows the life of Denis Diderot as he undertakes to create the Encyclopedia in 18th century France.

Madeleine George (FY13) – Sparrows of the New World
A play about a taxonomist who begins to question everything when she is hit with a strange form of aphasia.

Tom Holloway (FY13) – A Model of Complete Perfection
The story of Fitz Haber; soldier and scientist.

Nathan Jackson (FY13) – No Hood Left Behind
A play about the implantation of Google Fiber in a small town in Kansas.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (FY13) – Untitled
A play about an underground economy in the 1800s: exploring a world wherein medical deans and students hired what would become known as “resurrectionists” to provide them with a steady supply of cadavers.

Greg Pierce (FY13) – Untitled
A story of food contamination on farms, and how the actions of a farmer in one state can have a devastating effect on someone nine states away.

April De Angelis (FY12) – The Fence
The story of the wives of the scientists who developed the Atomic Bomb.

Nick Jones (FY12) – Phreaks
The story of Josef Carl Engressia Jr, a legendary figure in the phone phreaking movement of the 70s.

Juliana Nash and Courtney Baron (FY12) – Untitled
A musical exploring the technological advancements and ethics of Martin Couney’s incubator exhibits.

Melissa Ross (FY12) – An Entomologist’s Love Story
Two scientists in the Natural History Museum who are trying to find something to love other than the bugs they study.

Heidi Schreck (FY12) – Untitled
A play about Russian Mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya. Sofia made enduring contributions to mathematical analysis, including pioneering work in the general theory of partial differential equations and a prize-winning paper in 1888 “On the Rotation of a Solid Body about a Fixed Point.”

Sarah Treem (FY12) – Untitled
A play juxtaposing the development of abortion as a clinical practice in the late 19th century with fertility treatments of the early 21st century.

Bess Wohl (FY12) – Continuity
A comedy about climate change examined through the lens of a Hollywood soundstage.

Lisa D’Amour (FY11) – Cut Off
A play about a family living in post-Katrina Louisiana.

Daniel Goldfarb (FY11) – Legacy
A modern day riff on the story of Abraham and Sarah that takes place in an IVF clinic, with the fertility doctor as God.

Samuel D. Hunter (FY11) – Mother Tongue
A story of a mother and son with different ideas on how hygiene influences health.

Nick Payne (FY11) – Dirac
Paul Dirac was one of the most eminent, committed, and deeply idiosyncratic British physicists of the twentieth century. This play will examine the early tension between the public and private life of the singular and enigmatic Dirac.

Hannie Rayson (FY11) – Extinction
Mining executive Harry Jewell takes an injured marsupial to an animal shelter, where university scientist Dr. Lucy Scheffer identifies it as an endangered animal. Harry decides to fund her research to give his company a “green” image.

Anne Washburn (FY11) – The Calico Man
Set in the Calico Hills of the Mojave desert in California 1963, and in the Olduvi Gorge in Kenya in 1959, this is a play based on the relationship between the paleoanthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey.

Michael West (FY11) – The Chinese Room
A play about artificial intelligence and whether or not a machine can be conscious.

Anna Ziegler (FY11) – Boy
The story of a boy who had sexual reassignment surgery at birth and how he deals with this knowledge later in life.

Steve Cosson (FY10) – The Gulf
A play about the dispersants used after the BP oil spill, and the hundreds of thousands of people exposed to toxic chemicals as a result of the clean-up.

Michael Mitnick (FY10) – The Acid Cowboy
A pop musical about a handful of years in the life of Dr. Leary, from the moment he first tried psilocybin mushrooms in Mexico in the summer of 1960 to his return to Harvard that fall, resulting in his experimentation of LSD on healthy Harvard students.

Simon Stephens (FY10) – Heisenberg
Amidst the bustle of a crowded London train station, Georgie spots Alex, a much older man, and initiates an encounter that changes both their lives. Their relationship is illuminated metaphorically by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

Melissa James Gibson (FY09) – Placebo
When Louise, a scientist, undertakes a placebo-controlled study of a new female arousal drug, her work in the lab begins to spill into her life at home.

Rebecca Lenkiewicz (FY09) – The Addicts
The life of Marie Curie. A two time Nobel Prize winner and the first woman to be appointed to a chair at the Sorbonne, Curie has a meaningful and intense relationship with her husband, fellow scientist Pierre, until his tragic death.

Eric Simonson (FY09) – The Polygamist is an Atheist
The play centers around a pop culture celebrity who writes a bestseller arguing that polygamy is imprinted on the human genome and the effect that the book has on his career and his personal life.

Catherine Trieschmann (FY09) – How the World Began
A religious fundamentalist student confronts his atheist science teacher following the 2005 Kansas Board of Education ruling to include challenges to evolutionary theory in science curriculum throughout the state.

Rinne Groff (FY08) – The Story of Forgetting (adaptation of Stefan Merrill Block’s novel)
Three interrelated narratives which hinge around a family’s struggle with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease.

Lucy Kirkwood (FY08) – Mosquitoes
Astro-physicist Alice is working on Geneva’s Large Hadron Collider, and as she navigates the great unknown of the universe she must also try to keep her family together.

Hannah Moscovitch (FY08) – Infinity
Four interconnected stories concerning the underground sale of knee implants, which explores the human desire to combat mortality through scientific innovation.

Mark Schultz (FY08) – John Dee
The play focuses on the relationship between renaissance polymath John Dee and his protégé Thomas Digges.

Beau Willimon (FY08) – Kasparov
A dramatization of the 1997 chess match between IBM’s computer Deep Blue and reigning World Champion Garry Kasparov.

Kenneth Lin (FY07) – Intelligence-Slave
The play chronicles Austrian-born inventor Curt Herzstark’s struggle to withhold from his Nazi captors the calculator he invented.

Craig Lucas (FY07) – Galileo
An adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo, which concerns the later period of Galileo’s life when he suffered persecution for his scientific ideas.

Rona Munro (FY07) – Donny’s Brain
Donny’s suffered a major brain injury, but he’s sure he’ll recover in the care of the love of his life, Emma. But Emma is acting strangely, and who is this other woman who won’t stop weeping by his bedside?

Brett Neveu (FY07) – Iowa Dirt
The play follows a geomorphologist whose work on his latest book is interrupted when his delinquent twenty-six year old son returns following a five year absence.

Ron Hutchinson (FY06) – An End to Grief
Botanist Jules Emile Planchon’s efforts to stem a disease that is destroying the vineyards of France during the 1860s.

Eric Simonson (FY06) – Fake
An examination of the infamous Piltdown Man, also known as the Missing Link, “discovered” by archaeologist Charles Dawson at the turn of the 20th century.

Dava Sobel (FY06) – And the Sun Stood Still
A play about Copernicus’ efforts to publish his theory of a sun-centered universe in 1539.

Jason Wells (FY06) – Perfect Mendacity
The play investigates issues in the defense industry and asks the question: Is it possible to beat a polygraph by undetectable means?

Stephen Belber (FY05) – Geometry of Fire aka Asymmetrical Battlefield
A play about chemical weapons, health, and the environment.

Bryony Lavery (FY05) – Dirt
A thriller, which weaves the story of an old woman who discovers her sister half dead in a dumpster with the mystery of the young woman’s death.

Itamar Moses (FY05) – Completeness
Examination of the life of a mathematician, the relationships that define his existence and the pitfalls of man’s reliance on computer technology.

Peter Morris (FY04) – The Vasty Deep
Early 20th century scientists’ engagement with Spiritualism, the belief that it is possible to communicate with the dead through mediums and séances.

Shelagh Stephenson (FY04) – Fallout
A play about a blacklisted screenwriter who confronts scientist Robert Oppenheimer.

Charles Evered (FY03) – Clouds Hill
A play about a terrorist’s study in an American university linked to making chemical weapons.

John Walch (FY02) – The Nature of Mutation
A play about Evolution vs. Intelligent Design in a boarding school classroom.

Glen Berger (FY01) – On Words and Onwards
Study of linguistics as a cultural and biological marker of the evolution of humankind.