The Women in the Arts & Media Coalition (WAM Coalition) will honor outstanding artists creating new interdisciplinary work during the 2025 Collaboration Awards: Women Working with Women.
The gala, which honors outstanding partnerships between professional women from different specializations across the arts and media industries, will be held on Saturday, Dec. 6, at 6 p.m. in the Fred and Adele Astaire Ballroom at Houghton Hall Arts Community, 22 East 30th St. in Manhattan.
The WAM Coalition stated that the event is being presented at a time when opportunities for both women and the arts are under threat.
The WAM Coalition, a centralized resource for professional women in the performing arts and media industries, announced that it will present its 7th Collaboration Award to playwright Lynda Crawford and choreographer Kat Files for the play with dance, Dusk!
Sibyl Reymundo-Santiago, who will serve as emcee for the evening, will receive the WAM Coalition’s Community Collaboration Award for her work as executive director and head of programming for the Soho International Film Festival.
“Every year, we are inspired by the ways women artists find one another, build teams and make work that refuses to be silenced,” said WAM Coalition Co-Presidents Avis Boone, Yvonne Curry, and Shellen Lubin. “This year’s honorees reflect the breadth of our community, whether emerging voices or established leaders, and affirm our belief that when women are supported, the culture changes.”
First runners-up include: Playwright Pamela Weiler Grayson and actor Arielle Flax for the play Observant, a New York State Council on the Arts grant winner, three-time Samuel French Short Play winner Arlene Hutton, and actor Dana Brooke for the play Blood of the Lamb.
Honored finalists are: Playwright-lyricist Abs Wilson and the award-winning composer Veronica Mansour for the musical Lighthouse, which also won a 2024 Richard Rodgers Awards for Musical Theater; Writer and McKnight, Soros and Guggenheim fellow Kao Kalia Yang and composer Jocelyn Hagen for the opera The Song Poet, the first Hmong story brought to the operatic stage; and playwright Melissa Bell and director Laurie A. Guzda for the dark comedy Zoe Comes Home.
Student Collaboration Awardees are: Marymount Manhattan College’s Bella Panico and Isabella De Oliveira Makiyama Lopes for The Nowhere Women; School of Visual Arts BFA Film Department’s Beatriz Coelho de Soarez and Destinee-Jolene Marcion for perpetually being the collaborative glue that makes a project and a community cohere.
Through its member organizations — Actors’ Equity Association, Associated Musicians of New York Local 802 AFM, Dramatists Guild, League of Professional Theatre Women, New York Women in Communications, New York Women in Film & Television, SAG-AFTRA New York Local, Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, and the Writers Guild of America, East — and its affiliates, the WAM Coalition represents more than 100,000 women and nonbinary artists in the arts and media.
All of the winners are themselves members of these associations and/or individual members of the WAM Coalition.
Contact: info@womanartsmediacoalition.org for more details.
