The T. Fellowship has renamed the mentorship program the Prince Fellowship in honor of its founder, the late Hal Prince.
Prince created the fellowship in 2005 as a means to usher in the next generation of creative producers. The program, which is managed by the Columbia University School of the Arts, gives fellows a $10,000 stipend and a $20,000 grant to produce new work, as well as the ability to audit theater classes and gain mentorship from a panel of prominent producers.
The current Prince Fellowship Mentors are Kristin Caskey, Sue Frost, Tom Schumacher, Jeffrey Seller and David Stone.
The program has also added a new group of advisors: Victoria Bailey, Christopher Burney, Lisa Dawn Cave, Nina Essman, Kamilah Forbes, Robert Fried, Colleen Jennings-Roggensack, Brian Moreland, Julio Peterson, Natasha Sinha, Donna Walker-Kuhne, Schele Williams and Kumiko Yoshii.
Prince, who passed away in July 2019, originally named the program after his own mentor, producer T. Edward Hambleton.
The idea for the fellowship came out of discussions Prince had been having with Hambleton, as well as his friends, Geraldine Stutz and Ed Wilson, about the Broadway landscape of the early 2000s. At the time, Prince feared that commerce was overtaking artistic expression.
“It’s all about how you feel about an art form. It’s either an art form, or it’s there to entertain and be more or less disposable,” Prince told Broadway News in a 2018 interview.
The 2021 Prince Fellowship, which will open up applications at the end of April, will run from September 2021 through August 2022. Previous fellows include Orin Wolf and John Pinkard, Aaron Glick, Jen Hoguet, Christopher Maring, Allison Bressi, Rachel Sussman and Ben Holtzman.
