Baltimore Center Stage (BCS) and Breaking the Binary Theatre proudly announce the next cohort of its Trans History Project, a national initiative created by BCS Artist-in-Residence Bo Frazier. The project is dedicated to commissioning and developing ten new plays by ten transgender and gender-nonconforming (TGNC) writers. Cohort Two includes five plays by five TGNC playwrights.
“At a moment when trans and gender non-conforming people are being targeted, erased, and forced to fight for the right to exist openly and safely, telling our stories is an act of resistance,” said Frazier. “The Trans History Project is about more than representation. It’s about reclaiming the history that has always been ours, honoring the artists who are shaping our present, and ensuring that future generations know we have always been here. By investing in trans and gender non-conforming artists, we are insisting that our stories belong in the American story—and that our voices deserve to be heard, celebrated, and remembered on stages across this country.”
Selected from a pool of 12 finalists representing 100 submissions for this second cohort of the initiative, the five playwrights are Ty Defoe, Justice Jamal Jones, Youri Kim, Nico Pang, and K.T. Peterson.
Each playwright will receive a $10,000 commission and will benefit from development support through a coalition of regional theaters, including Actors Theatre of Louisville in Kentucky, About Face Theatre in Chicago, East West Players in Los Angeles, and Native Voices in Los Angeles.
The 12 finalists include playwrights NOVA BLACK, Grant Evan, Tyler Rocio Econa, Reese Fernandez, Alex Lee Reed, Charlie Amaya Scott, Nigel Semaj, Ryan Matthieu Smith, Shariga Yazmeen, as well as playwriting duo LexXavier Francis & Che Flory and the ensemble Friend of Friend.
Ty Defoe’s Trans World Chapter 0 – Obsidian will be developed at Native Voices. Philadelphia, 1976. As America celebrates its Bicentennial, Yarrow, a two-spirit transsexual artist, discovers that art and obsidian can open portals into erased trancestor histories. Moving between queer nightlife, colonial pageantry, and ancestral memory, Yarrow unearths stories the nation has tried to bury, histories of resistance, survival, and revolution that began long before 1776. But as each portal draws her deeper into the past, the boundaries between memory, myth, and the present begin to fracture. Yarrow must choose between preserving the world she knows and unleashing ancestral truths powerful enough to unravel America’s founding myths and reimagine its future.
Justice Jamal Jones’ La Prophétesse will be developed at About Face Theatre. Based on the award-winning book The Priest and the Prophetess by Terry Rey, La Prophétesse is a blur of possession and performance, exhuming the life of the gender-queer Haitian revolutionary and mystic Romaine La Prophétesse. Here, the revolution is not televised but theatrically portrayed, where the archive becomes an afterlife and theatre becomes ritual.
Youri Kim’s SABANGJI.exe will be developed at Baltimore Center Stage Theatre. SABANGJI.EXE is a work of fiction built from a single line in the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty that records a person named Sabangji, and it follows that one line across six centuries to ask, who gets to write a person into the record, who gets to erase them, and what it costs to be consumed by systems never built to hold you. The ability to erase someone, race, or country is a form of power, the same power the current administration is using to remove trans and nonbinary people from passports and government records.
Nico Pang’s Stone Maiden will be developed at East West Players. In 1851 Qing Dynasty China, Liao Zhanggu is labeled a “stone maiden” for being unable to reproduce and is exiled to a Daoist monastery. Two hundred years later in the United States, a trans Chinese musician finds Zhanggu’s buried court record. As music jumps off the page and the archive cracks, they are pulled through time and wake up inside Zhanggu’s body. Within the monastery, where the ideal self is androgynous and ritual kinship offers new ways of belonging, they begin piecing together a lost history from within. But this spiritual refuge is threatened as imperial investigations loom. They must choose: fight to return to 2051, or stay and alter the fate of someone who may be an ancestor, a mirror, or both.
K.T. Peterson’s Everybody’s Total Pal! will be developed at Actors Theatre of Louisville. Everybody’s Total Pal! is part public access show, part cabaret aboard the ship ENDURANCE! A frostbitten sailor from Shackleton’s crew puts on a show to keep himself from going mad, but the sailor is not who he seems. Through a shape-shifting solo performance inspired by historic TGNC figures like gender-queer prophet Public Universal Friend, trans doctor Alan L. Hart, and Shaker founder Ann Lee, the play asks what happens when we reclaim the divine, the creative, the queer, and the joyful from the boxes we’ve inherited.
Building on the inaugural cohort’s work, which includes A Continent of Forget by Dane Edidi Figueroa, developed at Long Wharf Theatre; Days of Awe by Bree Lowdermilk, developed at Round House Theatre; The Gladys Bentley Project by Roger Q. Mason, developed at Diversionary Theatre; miss EMERICA by Yona Moises Olivares, developed at BCS; and LES BI(T)CHES by Mirage Auto Depot, developed at Rattlestick Theater, the second cohort will continue the Trans History Project’s mission of developing new plays that center TGNC histories, experiences, and perspectives.
PLAYWRIGHT BIOS
Pang (they/he) is a Cantonese writer and director exploring diasporic belonging, ancestral memory, and queerness as possibility. Nico is the winner of the 2026 Parity Development Award and the 2025 recipient of the Artists at Play Emerging Playwright Commission. They are a member of Geffen Playhouse’s 2026–2027 Writers’ Room and director of Trans Lineage, a trans-centered new work development program at Celebration Theatre. They are also co-founder of Passion of the Cut Sleeve, a queer multidisciplinary collective that reimagines Chinese folklore. Additional directing credits include Center Theatre Group, The Theater Offensive, CHUANG Stage, and the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.
Peterson (she/he) is a Women Works Playwright winner, Jerome Fellowship finalist and recipient of the Musical Theatre Award at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. She is a graduate of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop and Towson University, where she taught acting and rhetoric. Her play Love Bird has been produced at the Phoenix Theatre Cultural Centre and Off-Central Players in St. Petersburg, Florida. She also appeared in the short film INTRE, produced by A Certain Something Productions.
Defoe (giizhig) (he/we/ty) is a Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer citizen of the Oneida Nation and Anishinaabe Tribe, playwright, and sovereign story trickster whose work centers gender sovereignty, Indigenous futurity, and the transformative power of storytelling. A Grammy Award-winning artist and 2026 United States Artists Fellow, Ty creates across theater, music, movement, installation, film, and immersive technologies, weaving ancestral knowledge with contemporary and speculative forms. Raised in the Great Lakes, Ty understands story as medicine, memory, and a vessel for carrying knowledge forward. As a 2S/IQ+ story artist, Ty challenges colonial narratives that frame transgender, queer, and gender-expansive identities as new, instead rooting gender diversity in Indigenous histories, cosmologies, kinship systems, and ancestral ways of knowing. Ty’s Firebird Tattoo appears in The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays for the Stage (Bloomsbury). Their Yale-commissioned Trans World II: Madoodiswan, part of the TRANS WORLD quadriology play cycle, imagines trans futures through Indigenous world-building, kinship, and ecological responsibility. Ty’s work has been presented at and by Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Human Achievement, FuseBox Festival, Guthrie Theater, Park Avenue Armory, New Harmony Project, PlayPenn, and PAC-NYC. A member of All My Relations Collective, Ty resides in New York City and loves mood rings.
Jones (they/she) is a New York City-based filmmaker, theatermaker and actor whose award-winning films How to Raise a Black Boy and Notes on a Siren have earned international acclaim. They have directed commissioned work for MTV, Calvin Klein, Converse and ARRI. A 2021 Sundance Ignite Fellow, 2025 Explorers Club inductee and 2026 Sundance Trans Possibilities Fellow, Jones is an NYU Tisch and Gallatin graduate whose work explores identity, boyhood and the boundaries between lived experience and storytelling.
Kim (they/she) is a Korean playwright, director and teaching artist based in the DMV. Their work, including SABANGJI.EXE and BAAL, explores how systems of power shape and regulate bodies. They are the founding artistic director of Jaemi Theatre Company, an AAPI theater company in the DMV, and serve as communications and cultivation manager at Spooky Action Theater. Kim is the inaugural recipient of the 2025 SDCF Lynnette Barkley Fund and a member of the TPOC Broadway Cohort. They trained at GITIS in Moscow and hold an MFA from East 15 Acting School.
For more information about the Trans History Project, visit centerstage.org/education/trans-history-project/.
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