Alumna playwright Gloria Oladipo ’21 has been named the winner of the 2024 Thom Thomas Award from the Dramatists Guild Foundation.
The $10,000 Thom Thomas award is given to an alumnus of the Dramatist Guild’s Fellows program who shows “great artistic skill.”
Oladipo, who grew up in Chicago but now lives in New York City, said she’s been interested in theatre and culture since she was a child. She had the chance to dive deeply into the industry in high school, where she was part of the Steppenwolf Theatre’s Young Adult Council, a program where students gather weekly to learn the inner workings of professional arts organizations.
“We met with artistic directors and playwrights. It was a real education for me,” Oladipo said, adding that she was also chosen to attend a playwriting festival at the Curious Theatre Company in Denver as a high school student.
At Cornell, Oladipo was a Posse Scholar who majored in government and had an English minor in the College of Arts & Sciences, but she took plenty of classes in performing and media arts and was very involved at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts.
“I did a lot of short play festivals, really motivated by Aoise Stratford [advising dean in A&S and a lecturer in performing and media arts], my playwriting teacher,” Oladipo said. “I remember going to office hours where she told me ‘you should be a playwright.’ At the time, I wasn’t thinking about that, but her words really stayed with me.”
Stratford said she isn’t surprised by Oladipo’s success.
“Gloria struck me, from our very first class, as a playwright of huge promise,” she said. “I still remember her first 10-minute play, which exhibited a keen sense of conflict and a strong ear for dialogue.
“What I have most enjoyed about her work is that she’s a keen observer of people. She sees all the small moments and imperfections and writes them with a critical eye and a big heart. I couldn’t be more delighted that she has won this award and I doubt it will be the last one.”
Oladipo also is thankful for Paul Sawyer, professor emeritus in the Literatures in English Department, who was one of the first people to champion her work.
"He wrote page-long responses to the most cluttered first drafts of plays, including the one that won this prize," she said. "He entertained hour-plus rants with me about Arthur Miller and Degrassi, in addition to being a major personal support system. I am a writer because of him and his involvement with the Posse Foundation."
During the summer of 2018, Oladipo applied for funding to start the Veterans’ Playwriting Process in Chicago, an organization that continues today offering 8-week playwriting courses to veterans.
A Posse scholar, Oladipo won the Jeff Ubben Posse Fellows Program scholarship in 2019, allowing her to spend the summer with Oskar Eustis, director of The Public Theater in New York City.
“We don’t meet playwrights in the same way we meet actors, so, for me, seeing other young, working playwrights who were winning awards and fellowships, it made it seem real to me,” she said.
As a Cornell student, she said she would have an idea and just start writing about it.
“My work always starts with something that calls me,” she said. “I will know I want to write about it and I keep thinking about this person or this notion or this theme.”
It’s never been about making playwriting a full-time gig, Oladipo said.
“If I had a play I wanted to write, I just wanted to share it and have the development resources to do that,” she said. “I consider myself equal parts artist and journalist and theatre critic and different things.”
Oladipo is a 2023-2025 Public Theater's Emerging Writers Group Fellow and a 2025 Velvetpark Writers Fellow. She is a 2022-2023 Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellow alumnus and a previous Seven Devils New Play Conference resident. Her plays include “The Care and Keeping of Schizophrenia (and Other Demons),” “I Wanna Kill, Annie G.,” “The Good Victim” and “The Forever War.”
Her work has been in residence or developed by New York Stage and Film in Poughkeepsie, New York; the Lucille Lortel Theatre in New York, New York; Boston Court Pasadena in Pasadena, California; Workshop Theater in New York, New York; the Fresh Ground Pepper Group, and other institutions.
She is also an award-winning cultural critic and journalist with The Guardian, where she reports on culture, politics, race and other issues. Her work has also appeared in the Washington Post and the New York Times.
These days, Oladipo’s life is filled with work for The Guardian, as well as her own projects. She is waiting to hear about several plays she has in development, as well as a pilot for a television show.
The Thom Thomas award is an honor, she said.
“Being taken into that [The Dramatist Guild] fellowship program, I met the most incredible peers and mentors,” she said. “It was extremely affirming as one of my first attempts to be a professional playwright. And the award, which is named after a person of such artistic achievement who touched so many people, was amazing to win.”
