Trans and Gender Nonconforming People have always Existed.
Now we tell our stories.
The Trans History Project is a revolutionary national initiative created by Bo Frazier, Baltimore Center Stage’s Artist-in-Residence. Led by Baltimore Center Stage and Breaking the Binary Theatre, this project aims to commission, develop, and publish 10 new plays about the real history of gender non-conformity which has existed across all cultures since the beginning of time. There will be 10 Trans and Gender Nonconforming playwrights (TGNC) commissioned by BCS who will subsequently be placed into 2-year development residencies at theaters across the country in 2 cohorts.
Cohort TWO:
Ty Defoe
Ty 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.
Trans World Chapter 0 – ObsidianPhiladelphia, 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. Trans World Chapter 0 – Obsidian will be developed at Native Voices |
Justice Jamal Jones
Justice Jamal 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.
La ProphétesseBased 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. La Prophétesse will be developed at About Face Theatre. |
YourI KIM
Youri 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.
SABANGJI.EXESABANGJI.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. SABANGJI.exe will be developed at Baltimore Center Stage Theatre. |
Nico Pang
Nico 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.
Stone MaidensIn 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. Stone Maiden will be developed at East West Players. |
K.T. Peterson
K.T. 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.
Everybody’s Total Pal!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. Everybody’s Total Pal! will be developed at Actors Theatre of Louisville. |
ABOUT TRANS HISTORY PROJECT
MISSION:
- Tell the history of Transgender and Gender Nonconforming people across all cultures who have existed since the beginning of time
- Commission and pay 10 TGNC playwrights/creators/writers
- Create a cohort of theaters to develop and program TGNC stories in their seasons
- We hope to publish a TGNC canon/anthology of the 10 plays
- Enable Regional Theaters to engage, uplift and empower their local TGNC Communities
Bo Frazier – Creator & Program Director
BO FRAZIER (they/them) is a two-time Jeff Award-nominated theater director. As a trans femme, non-binary, queer and neurodivergent artist, they are interested in new work that tells traditionally excluded narratives in extremely imaginative ways.
DIRECTING/CHOREOGRAPHY: The all-trans production of tick, tick…BOOM! featured in American Theatre Magazine (Jeff Award Noms – Best Director and Best Musical), Botticelli in the Fire by Jordan Tannahill (Jeff Award Noms – Best Director & Best Production) Hit the Wall by Ike Holter, Men on Boats by Jaclyn Backhaus, Love & Information by Caryl Churchill, Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Simon Stephens, Bright Star the musical as well as Associate Directing the London premiere of bare: a rock opera. Previously based in Chicago, NYC and London, Bo has worked with companies such as The National Theatre (UK), Birmingham Rep (UK), Greenwich Theatre (UK), Goodman Theatre, NAMT, AMTP, Signature Theatre (NYC), Dixon Place, Rutgers University’s MFA/BFA Acting Program, Theatre167, Heartbeat Opera, Indiana Repertory Theatre, Sideshow Theatre, Rivendell Theatre, Theatre Cedar Rapids, Riverside Theatre and London Theatre Workshop (UK) which they co-founded. In 2022, they were one of the 9 remaining staff members fighting for Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater to stay alive. Represented by Bret Adams Ltd. www.bofrazier.com
Cohort ONE:
Dane Figueroa Edidi
DANE FIGUEROA EDIDI (she/her) Dubbed the Ancient Jazz Priestess of Mother Africa, Lady Dane is a Black Nigerian, Cuban, Indigenous, American Performance Artist, Author, Poet, Educator, Advocate, producer, a Helen Hayes Award winning Playwright (Klytmnestra: An Epic Slam Poem), a 2021 Helen Merrill Award Winner, Film Maker, Advocate, Dramaturg, a 3x Helen Hayes Award nominated choreographer (2016, 2018, 2023), and a Princess Grace Honoria Award winner. She is the co-founder and Co-director of the Black Trans Prayer Book. She is the curator and associate producer of Long Wharf Theatre’s Black Trans Women At The Center: An Evening of Short Plays and is an artistic ensemble member of the company as well.
A Continent of ForgetWhen a new man walks into her life, Lucy, a widow, does not know if she is ready to open herself to love again. As her culinary business blooms and her food gains notoriety, elders and ancestors alike rally around her as she learns how to let go. Steeped in Magical Realism and historical realities, A Continent of Forget is loosely based on and pays homage to the incredible life of Lucy Hicks Anderson (1886- 1954), an American Socialite, Chef and Philanthropist. A Continent of Forget will be developed in residence with Long Wharf Theatre. |
Bree Lowdermilk
BREE LOWDERMILK (she/they) is an award-winning theatre writer, composer, lyricist and orchestrator. Off-Broadway: The Mad Ones, Henry and Mudge. Nat’l Tour: Ada Twist Scientist & Friends, Henry and Mudge. Regional: Justice (Arizona Theatre Co, Marin Theatre Co), Earthrise (Kennedy Center), Dr. Wonderful (Kennedy Center), ERNXST, or the Importance of Being (Concord Theatricals), and The Bad Years, an immersive house party musical. Awards: Jonathan Larson, Alan Menken, Richard Rodgers. Concerts: Kennedy Center, Kimmel Center, Lincoln Center. Residencies: MacDowell, Mercer. Albums: Kerrigan-Lowdermilk Live, Our First Mistake (#1 Singer/Songwriter chart), The Mad Ones (+30 million streams; thousands of fan videos). Founder of NewMusicalTheatre.com, board member of Applied Mechanics. Bree is a non-binary trans woman, Mama to her energetic three-year-old, and an advocate for queer voices and stories. @breelowdermilk breelowdermilk.com
Days of AweYom Kippur dinner erupts into absurdity and chaos when a daughter comes out as trans to her Jewish family. After her family insists that her identity is “too newfangled,” we hurtle backwards chronologically through history, revealing the enduring presence and erasure of trans people across centuries and borders. In the period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, today at this family’s suburban home and thousands of years ago, Days of Awe invites us to look back—with humor, ritual, grief and reverence—in order to step forward. Days of Awe will be developed in residence at Round House Theatre |
Roger Q. Mason
ROGER Q. MASON (they/them) is an award-winning writer, performer, and thought leader whose work uses history as a lens to challenge systems of exclusion and uplift marginalized voices. Named “one of the most significant playwrights of the decade” by The Brooklyn Rail, Mason creates bold, genre-defying blending the poetic and the political with unapologetic power. Their theatrical work has been seen on Broadway at Circle in the Square (Circle Reading Series) and The 24 Hour Plays; Off- and Off-Off-Broadway at New Group, New York Theatre Workshop, The Flea, Dixon Place, P73, Breaking the Binary, and National Queer Theatre; and at regional and national venues including Philadelphia Theatre Company, Carnegie Hall, Center Theatre Group, McCarter Theatre, Victory Gardens, and Skylight Theatre Company. Roger’s plays are theatrical mythologies for the marginalized, especially those who are Black, Filipinx, TGNC, plus-sized, and previously erased from the classical canon. They walk in the legacy of Suzan-Lori Parks, George C. Wolfe, and Taylor Mac, blending historical excavation with avant-garde theatrical form. Mason holds degrees from Princeton University, Middlebury College, and Northwestern University. They received the Playwrights’ Center McKnight National Playwright Commission, the inaugural Dramatists Guild Foundation Catalyst Grant Award, a Lucille Lortel commission, a Kilroys List nod, and the Chuck Rowland Pioneer Award. Mason is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America, and an alum of the Ma-Yi’s Writing Lab, Page 73’s Interstate 73 Writers Group the Fire This Time Festival, and Primary Stages Writing Cohort. As an educator, Roger has served as a mentor for Lambda Literary, Workshop Theatre, the Marsha P. Johnson Institute’s Starship Fellowship, the New Visions Fellowship and the Shay Foundation Fellowship. They are currently on faculty at CalArts. Instagram: @rogerq.mason
The Gladys Bentley ProjectIt is 1952 Harlem’s most (in)famous drag king — Gladys Bentley — has hung up her gender-bending/queer affirming act, married a short order cook in Los Angeles and decided to write her life story. Join Gladys as she pitches us (the audience) her new biography. We’ll travel with her to the clubs that made her, the night Prohibition ended an era in her career, the doctor’s office where she sought sexual conversion “treatment”, and—all the while—we’ll ponder, “How does a vibrant dreamer like Gladys Bentley thrive in a world that limits her dreams?” The Gladys Bentley Project will be developed in residence at Diversionary Theatre. |
Yona Moises Olivares
YONA MOISES OLIVARES (they/she/he) is a GenderQueer artist based in Chicago. Proudly queer and proudly Latine, their work seeks to center voices left in the gaps. As an actor, designer, and storyteller, Yona strives to create altar for their communities by mixing different mediums in irreverent ways. Their work utilizes stream-of-consciousness poetry, journalistic interview, and camp in ways that seek to confront what is and isn’t theater. Their work brings to question what is the responsibility of the audience and storyteller – to inspire, to activate, to haunt? As a performer, they have performed at Steppenwolf, Actors Theatre of Louisville, American Players Theatre and more. Yona is represented by Gray Talent Group.
miss EMERICAShe is beauty, she is grace, she is undocumented? Congratulations and welcome to America, where you get the amazing opportunity to compete and earn your spot as a Real American Woman™! Part farce, part docu-theater, all bullsh*t, miss EMERICA, follows a group of historical Trans/GenderNB folks as they compete in a pageant that will grant only ONE participant citizenship. We the people, follow these contestants on and off stage as they seek to prove their “womanhood” and ultimately win their place in America, land of the beautiful. miss EMERICA will be developed in residence at Baltimore Center Stage. |
Mirage Auto Depot
MIRAGE AUTO DEPOT is a trans-experimental incubator and performance [art] collective obsessed with the processes of queer creative community, making and unmaking, the normalization of failure, hybridity, and the feverish development of hyper contemporary live arts: theatre, dance, music, puppetry, and video. We are developing new methods of collaborating, of being together, of being raucously gay, and of inverting narrative diagonally and upside-down. Led by Raychel Ceciro, Logan Gabrielle Schulman, with devising by Alexandra Neuman and Murphy Severtson, we are friends and lovers and idiots paving our own road.
LES BI(T)CHESLES BI(T)CHES is a trans-historical experiment spiraling around the simultaneous and divergent lives and creative practices of gender-nonconforming lesbian artists Claude Cahun and Romaine Brooks amidst the rising fascism of early 20th century Europe. Set against the backdrop of Parisian artist salons, LES BI(T)CHES examines queer community, resistance, and fracture in the face of oppression and splintering alliances and values. Adapted from the early 20th century ballet Les Biches choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska, and blending historical fiction with archival text, artworks, and speculative encounters, LES BI(T)CHES holds a warbled mirror to our present moment, searching through the detritus of the past to understand what holds queer communities together—and what divides us. LES BI(T)CHES will be developed in residence at Rattlestick Theater. |
If you have any questions reach out to Creator/Program Director Bo Frazier at transhistoryproject@centerstage.org
BREAKING THE BINARY THEATRE
Breaking the Binary Theatre is an Obie Award-winning new work development and community building hub wherein transgender, non-binary, and Two-Spirit+ (TNB2S+*) artists come together to reclaim our artistic license and liberty through a number of initiatives, including the yearly all-TNB2S+ Breaking the Binary Theatre Festival each October. Founded and led by George Strus (they/them), since Breaking the Binary Theatre’s launch in July 2022, the organization has paid out over $650,000 to over 500 TNB2S+ artists. www.btb-nyc.com
Major Support Provided by:
We are still Fundraising for this Major Project!
If you would like to support this important initiative contact our development team at Development@centerstage.org