Idris Goodwin, artistic director of the Seattle Children’s Theatre is the 2024 recipient of the Margo Jones Award.

The annual award honors "that citizen-of-the-theatre who has demonstrated a significant impact, understanding and affirmation of the craft of playwriting, with a lifetime commitment to the encouragement of the living theatre everywhere." The award commemorates Jones, a pioneer of the American professional regional theatre movement. Established in 1961 by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, the award is administered by the Lawrence and Lee Theatre Research Institute at The Ohio State University.

Goodwin is an award-winning interdisciplinary writer. Currently serving as artistic director of Seattle Children’s Theater, Goodwin writes, directs, programs, and produces relevant content for intergenerational audiences. His titles include How We Got On, Hype Man: A Break Beat Play, This is Modern Art, and Bars and Measures. Goodwin has been commissioned and/or produced by The Kennedy Center, The Eugene O'Neill Conference, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Arena Stage, and The Playwrights’ Center. 

As Board President of Theater for Young Audiences/USA, Goodwin champions the essential role of the performing arts in society. His storytelling prowess extends to creating original content for Nickelodeon, HBO Def Poetry, as well as his debut picture book Your House is Not Just A House (Clarion/Harper Collins 2024). You can hear Goodwin weekly as he summarizes the news in hip hop form on the Break Beat Week Podcast.                    

About the Margo Jones Award

The Margo Jones Medal commemorates one of the pioneers of the American professional regional theatre movement. Jones (1912-1955) supported and nurtured new plays at the theatre she founded in Dallas in 1947, including Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke and Lawrence and Lee’s Inherit the Wind. The pattern she created for developing new plays is now a standard method for producing new works in the living American theatre.

Previous recipients of the Margo Jones Award include Oskar Eustis, Paula Vogel, Lou Bellamy, Emily Mann, Anne Cattaneo, Christopher Durang, Marsha Norman, George C. White, Jane Alexander, Ellen Stewart, and Joseph Papp.