Nikki Skies named WTP's 2022-2023 New Play Development Apprentice

Working Title Playwrights' has named Nikki Skies their 2022-2023 apprentice for New Play Development. Launched in 2018, the New Play Development Apprentice leadership program was designed to train and uplift current and future leaders in all aspects of new play dramaturgy and arts administration, with a new artist being invited annually. 

From WTP's Website: 

During her tenure as the New Play Development Apprentice, Skies shares, “I am interested in applying an intersectional approach to the dramaturgical process that brings into conversation the existing interlocked social constructs that typically may not be addressed. I imagine these conversations will expand the commonplace ‘what is happening’ to a ‘how this may be happening’. How might this approach influence the set design, music and lighting? Additionally, how might these conversations consider the diversity in an audience?”

Nikki Skies is an accomplished poet/author, dramaturg, playwright and actor. Her latest play, Seasons is Her Name, debuted at the 2022 Mid American Theatre Conference in Cleveland, Ohio. In 2017, her play, Hope’s Return, had its debut at the esteemed National Black Theatre Festival as a part of the New Works Reader’s Theatre among a national selection of over 400 plays. NIkki has been commissioned to write a play on Black women mathematicians through the RISE educational grant in collaboration with faculty from the University of South Carolina at Beaufort. For television, Skies was a creative writer for the drama and for the digital series, “Rebel Yell.” A Grambling State University alumna (B. A. in Theatre/Acting), Nikki studied in the Masters Film program for Screenplay Writing at Howard University, received a M.A. in Africana Women’s Studies from Clark Atlanta University, and is currently a doctoral student in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Georgia where she recently matriculated with a graduate certificate in African American Studies. Skies is currently adjunct faculty at Spelman College in the Arts and Visual Culture Department.