After thoughtful consideration, the Travis Bogard Artist in Residence Committee has awarded the following fellowships in 2026:

Bill Bowers is returning to Tao House to continue work on his memoir which he began in his 2021 residency. Bill is an accomplished mime who developed the Physical Theatre Lab which offers a five-week intensive on a variety of physical pedagogues and techniques.

Maria Gallego is a professor at Universidad Loyola in Seville, Spain. Maria intends to focus research on two of O’Neill’s plays of the 20s during the Harlem Renaissance to the contemporary drama production of two current African American women playwrights, Zora Neale Huston and Georgia Douglas Johnson. She intends to “acquire a profound knowledge of O’Neill’s seminal work to be able to make the necessary connections with the African American women playwrights’ concerns and techniques.”

Phillip Smith teaches acting at Pace University in New York. Phillip’s play is about family; an elderly father and his middle-aged son and daughter. He intends to experiment with form and his current plan of having intersecting timelines. He intends to “pull from my own family history and tell a story of Black Life in America in the late 1940’s and what it is to care for an elderly parent today.”

Charles Stewart plans to work on a play he has begun entitled “The Irresistibles” which follows two college roommates—one of whom is black and the other white— who test a homemade time machine, hurling them into racially-charged and culturally-defining eras of the past. “The play examines why Black culture is celebrated worldwide even as Black lives remain devalued.”

J. Chris Westgate, an O’Neill scholar, will continue his research for a scholarly monograph that will examine the significance of shipwrecks in O’Neill’s early plays and connect these plays with a “long tradition of shipwreck literature” that includes such tomes as Homer’s The Odyssey, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and James Cameron’s film Titanic.