The Washington University International Humanities Prize is awarded biennially to a person who has contributed significantly to the humanities through a body of work that has dramatically impacted how we understand the human condition. In 2022, the humanities center will honor cartoonist-memoirist Alison Bechdel. Past recipients are as follows: Alison Bechdel (2024), Sir David Adjaye (2018), Bill T. Jones (2016), Marjorie Perloff (2014), Ken Burns (2012), Francine Prose (2010), Michael Pollan (2008), Orhan Pamuk (2006).
The prize amount was increased from $25,000 to $50,000 in 2023. The recipient gives a public lecture on the Washington University campus, as well as interacting with students and community members throughout their visit.
A selection committee constituted by Washington University humanities faculty convenes to review nominated candidates and their body of work. The director of the Center for the Humanities invites the selected recipient approximately one year prior to the award ceremony. Faculty and student engagement with the recipient’s work is encouraged (including reading groups and special course work). During the visit, the recipient interacts with a wide range of members of the campus community, including undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and senior administration.
International Humanities Prize 2025: Lynn Nottage
Lynn Nottage. Photo by Lynne Savarese.
Internationally acclaimed playwright, screenwriter, installation artist and MacArthur “genius grant” recipient Lynn Nottage will receive the 2025 International Humanities Prize from Washington University in St. Louis.
The biennial prize, awarded by WashU’s Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences, honors the lifetime work of a noted scholar, writer or artist who has made a significant and sustained contribution to the world of arts and letters.
“Lynn Nottage is a masterful storyteller of the human condition,” said Julia Walker, professor of English and chair of the Performing Arts Department, both in Arts & Sciences. “While her plays address some of today’s most complex and difficult issues at the intersection of race, gender and labor relations, they also feature multidimensional characters who are immanently recognizable because their truths speak to our lives, too.”
Nottage will receive the Humanities Prize during a public ceremony April 16, 2025, in the Clark-Fox Forum of WashU’s Hillman Hall. Additional events and programming related to her visit will be announced in the coming months. The prize is accompanied by a $50,000 award — up from $25,000 in previous years.
“The International Humanities Prize recognizes the breadth and depth of a nominee’s contributions to the humanities,” said Stephanie Kirk, director of the Center for the Humanities. “Lynn Nottage is an accomplished dramatist who also has worked to bring the power of theater to new spaces and under-served communities. We could not be more thrilled to welcome her to campus.”
About Lynn Nottage
The first, and still only, woman to have twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Nottage was born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., by a family of nurses, teachers, activists and artists. As a student at Harlem’s Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art, she was selected — on the strength of her play “The Dark Side of Verona,” about Black actors staging Shakespeare in the American South — for a workshop mentored by Stephen Sondheim.
Nottage earned her bachelor’s degree in English and in African American studies from Brown University in 1986 and her master’s of fine arts in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama in 1989. While working as a press officer for Amnesty International, she contributed a short piece, “Ida Mae Cole Takes a Stance” to the 1992 musical revue “A… My Name is Still Alice.” The following year, her short play “Poof!”, about marriage and spontaneous combustion, debuted at the Actors Theater in Louisville, Ky.
Nottage’s first full-length play, “Crumbs from the Table of Joy,” was commissioned by New York’s Second Stage Theater in 1995. It was soon followed by “Por’Knockers” (1995), “Mud, River, Stone” (1997), “Las Meninas” (2002), “Intimate Apparel” (2003) and “Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine” (2004). In 2009, Nottage won her first Pulitzer for “Ruined,” which explores the aftermath of civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Nottage’s second Pulitzer came in 2017 for “Sweat,” which follows three friends in the fading industrial town of Reading, Pa., and which The New Yorker called “the first theatrical landmark of the Trump Era.” After its Broadway run, “Sweat” embarked on a National Mobile Unit Tour, traveling to small towns across the Midwest. Building on the two years of interviews she’d conducted for the play, Nottage also developed the 2017 performance installation “This is Reading” at the Reading Railroad Station.
Other plays include “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark” (2011), “One More River to Cross: A Verbatim Fugue” (2015), “Mlima’s Tale” (2018) and “Clydes” (2021). She also wrote the book for “MJ The Musical” (2021), featuring the music of Michael Jackson, and for “The Secret Life of Bees” (2021), a musical adaptation of the novel by Sue Monk Kidd.
Nottage was a writer and producer on the Netflix series “She’s Gotta Have It,” directed by Spike Lee, and a consulting producer on the third season of the Apple+ series “Dickinson.” She also co-founded Market Road Films, a production company where projects have included The New York Times op-doc “Takeover” (2021), the Peabody-nominated podcast “Unfinished: Deep South” (2020) and the documentaries “The Notorious Mr. Bout” (2014), “First to Fall” (2013) and “Remote Control” (2013).
In addition to her MacArthur Fellowship and Pulitzer Prizes, Nottage has received the National Black Theatre Fest’s August Wilson Playwriting Award, the Doris Duke Artist Award and grants and honors from the Academy of Arts and Letters, the Dramatists Guild, the Guggenheim Foundation, Jewish World Watch, PEN, the Steinberg Charitable Trust, Time magazine and the William Inge Festival. She is currently a professor of drama at the Columbia School of the Arts and an artist-in-residence at the Park Avenue Armory.
International Humanities Prize 2022: Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel’s comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For became a countercultural institution during its run from 1983 to 2006. And her more recent, darkly humorous graphic memoirs about her family have forged an unlikely intimacy with an even wider range of readers. In 2006 she published Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, named by Time magazine named as the Best Book of 2006. It was adapted into a musical by the playwright Lisa Kron and the composer Jeanine Tesori. It opened on Broadway at the Circle in the Square Theater in 2015 and won five Tony Awards, including “Best Musical.” Her 2012 memoir Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama delved into not just her relationship with her own mother, but the theories of the 20th century British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. Her most recent book, The Secret to Superhuman Strength (May 2021), continues her investigation of the relationship between inside and outside, in this case the outside where she skis, bikes, hikes, and wanders in pursuit of fitness and, incidentally, self-transcendence.
Bechdel’s comics have appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Book Review and Granta. She has been awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships.
International Humanities Prize 2018: Sir David Adjaye
Sir David Adjaye OBE is recognized as a leading architect of his generation. Adjaye was born in Tanzania to Ghanaian parents and his influences range from contemporary art, music and science to African art forms and the civic life of cities. In 1994, he set up his first office, where his ingenious use of materials and his sculptural ability established him as an architect with an artist’s sensibility and vision. In 2017, Adjaye was recently knighted by Her Majesty the Queen for services to Architecture, following the previous award of an OBE in 2007. The same year, he was recognized as one of the 100 most influential people of the year by TIME magazine. He has additionally received the Design Miami/ Artist of the Year title in 2011, the Wall Street Journal Innovator Award in 2013 and the 2016 Panerai London Design Medal from the London Design Festival.
International Humanities Prize 2016: Bill T. Jones
Bill T. Jones, Artistic Director of New York Live Arts and Artistic Director/Co-Founder of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, is a multi-talented artist, choreographer, dancer, theater director and writer who has received major honors ranging from the 2013 National Medal of Arts to a 1994 MacArthur “Genius” Award and Kennedy Center Honors in 2010. Mr. Jones was honored with the 2014 Doris Duke Artist Award, recognized as Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2010, inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2009 and named “An Irreplaceable Dance Treasure” by the Dance Heritage Coalition in 2000. His ventures into Broadway theater resulted in a 2010 Tony Award for Best Choreography in the critically acclaimed FELA!, the new musical co-conceived, co-written, directed and choreographed by Mr. Jones. He also earned a 2007 Tony Award for Best Choreography in Spring Awakening as well as an Obie Award for the show’s 2006 off-Broadway run. His choreography for the off-Broadway production of The Seven earned him a 2006 Lucille Lortel Award.
International Humanities Prize 2014: Majorie Perloff
Marjorie Perloff is one of the foremost American critics of contemporary poetry. She teaches courses and writes on 20th- and now 21st-century poetry and poetics, both Anglo-American and from a comparatist perspective, as well as on intermedia and the visual arts. She is professor emerita of English at Stanford University and the Florence R. Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California. She is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
International Humanities Prize 2012: Ken Burns
Ken Burns has been making films for more than 30 years. Since the Academy Award nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, Burns has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made. A December 2002 poll conducted by Real Screen Magazine listed The Civil War as second only to Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North as the “most influential documentary of all time,” and named Burns and Flaherty as the most influential documentary makers of all time. In March 2009, David Zurawik of The Baltimore Sun wrote, “Burns is not only the greatest documentarian of the day, but also the most influential filmmaker period. That includes feature filmmakers like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. I say that because Burns not only turned millions of persons onto history with his films, he showed us a new way of looking at our collective past and ourselves.” The late historian Stephen Ambrose said of his films, “More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than any other source.” Burns’ films have won 12 Emmy Awards and two Oscar nominations, and in September of 2008, at the News & Documentary Emmy Awards, he was honored by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
International Humanities Prize 2010: Francine Prose
Francine Prose has been a prolific and much-honored author of both novels and non-fiction books. Her fiction include A Changed Man, Blue Angel, Hunters and Gatherers, Bigfoot Dreams, Primitive People, and Guided Tours of Hell. Among her nonfiction works are Sicilian Odyssey, Gluttony: The Seven Deadly Sins, and Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Observer, and numerous other publications. She is a contributing editor at Harper's, writes regularly on art for The Wall Street Journal, and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities.
International Humanities Prize 2008: Michael Pollan
Pollan is the author of five books, most recently the bestseller In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (2008), which examines the seemingly simply yet often difficult question of what, from the perspective of health, to eat. His previous volume, Omnivore’s Dilemma, was named one of the 10 best books of 2006 by The New York Times and the Washington Post. It also won the James Beard Foundation’s 2007 award for best food writing.
International Humanities Prize 2006: Orhan Pamuk
Orhan Pamuk’s books have been translated into 61 languages, including Georgian, Malayan, Czech, Danish, Japanese, Catalan, as well as English, German and French. Pamuk has been awarded The Peace Prize, considered the most prestigious award in Germany in the field of culture, in 2005. In the same year, Snow received the Le Prix Médicis étranger, the award for the best foreign novel in France. Again in 2005, Pamuk was honored with the Richarda Huck Prize, awarded every three years since 1978 to personalities who “think independently and act bravely.” In the same year, he was named among world’s 100 intellectuals by Prospect magazine. In 2006, TIME magazine chose him as one of the 100 most influential persons of the world. In September 2006, he won the Le Prix Méditerranée étranger for his novel Snow. Pamuk is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and holds an honorary doctorate from Tilburg University. He is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as the Chiese Academy for Social Sciences. Pamuk gives lectures once a year in Columbia University. Lastly, he received the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the second youngest person to receive the award in its history.
