Strides Collective
Commission 2025

An inaugural new play opportunity

SYNOPSIS

The Collective conducted a months-long search to find a passionate and self-motivated queer playwright for our inaugural commission. As we seek to expand the theatrical canon of great, modern queer stories from queer playwrights, this commission is designed to support the entire development process of a play, from idea inception to completed draft of a full-length script.

Over the course of a year, our commissioned playwright will work with our artistic team to develop this work, to culminate in a reading presentation in Spring 2026.

Meet our Commissioned Playwright!

Sophie Brion Neely is a playwright from Orange County, California. Her work has been developed and/or showcased by Kearny Street Workshop, the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Moving Arts, the Dramatic Question Theatre, and Amoeba Productions. Her plays have been selected as finalists or semifinalists for The Playwrights Realm’s Scratchpad Series, the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, the Dramatists Guild Foundation’s National Fellows Program, the Blue Ink Award, and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Ethnicity, Race, & Migration from Yale University and a Master of Science in Education from the University of Pennsylvania.

"Sophie's work stood out amongst 100 applications from emerging queer playwrights across the area, popping with creative specificity and a wholly unique voice. We believe Sophie's curiosity in chasing urgent realness and commitment to the multiplicity of queerness make her the perfect partner for Strides, and we cannot wait to see what play gets dreamed up in the month's ahead." - Jonathan Edmondson, Founding Artistic Director

“The Strides Collective’s mission aligns with my belief that we hold ourselves collectively accountable to write courageous theater for the present day… As the inaugural playwright for The Strides Collective Commission, I look forward to welcoming others to my version of that work - messy an imperfect, but still, a home I’m dedicated to inviting others into.” - Sophie Brion Neely