Hermitage Artistic Director and CEO Andy Sandberg, Anne Washburn and Flora Major. Provided photo.

On February 26, Andy Sandberg, Artistic Director and CEO of the Hermitage Artist Retreat, announced that Anne Washburn has been selected as the sixth recipient of the Hermitage Major Theater Award. Washburn, a New York-based playwright, will receive a cash prize of $35,000, a residency at the Hermitage Artist Retreat on Manasota Key and a developmental workshop of her newly created work at a theater to be announced in New York in fall 2027.

Washburn is a prolific playwright, produced nationally and internationally, and a 2007 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award winner and a PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award winner. Her most recent plays include 2025’s The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire, 2019’s Shipwreck and her 2012 play Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play was a New York Times Critic’s Pick. “Winning this award is amazing and comes at the exact right time for this project,” says Washburn. “It is perfect both in the very helpful amount of money and the strict set of deadlines for when different parts of the project need to be enacted, which is something that playwrights also need. We need money and we need deadlines.”

The Hermitage Major Theater Award was established in 2021 by the Hermitage with the support of Flora Major and Kutya Major Foundation to give a platform to some of theater’s most important voices. The award, replete with the cash prize, ensuing residency and developmental workshop, gives the recipient the opportunity to create a new, original, significant piece of theater. “The mission of the Hermitage is to inspire and foster the most influential and culturally consequential art and artists of our time, and I think this award embodies that mission so fully,” says Sandberg. “We are an incubator and development organization and this award gives us the ability to launch that work, build it here, celebrate the DNA of that work in our local community and then send that work out into the world.”

Hermitage Artist Retreat, 6660 Manasota Key Rd., Englewood.

Hermitage Artistic Director and CEO Andy Sandberg, Anne Washburn and Flora Major. Provided photo.

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