Alumna Barbara Seyda

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Photography: 
A.T. Willett

Alumna Barbara Seyda won the 2015 Yale Drama Series Prize, which recognizes emerging  playwrights, for her play Celia, a Slave: 26 Characters Testify. “I like theater that’s confrontational,” says Seyda MGSA’82, whose work was selected by playwright Nicholas Wright from roughly 1,500 submissions from 47 countries. Celia, a Slave is based on the 1855 case the State of Missouri vs. Celia, a Slave, in which a 19-year-old slave was convicted and hanged for killing her abusive master, Robert Newsom, a Missouri landowner. The play is a series of interviews with the dead.