Announcing Playwright and Performer R. Forest Malley as the 2025 Ryan Hudak LGBTQ+ Dramatic Writing Award Recipient

Malley recognized with $8,000 cash grant open to New York State playwrights and screenwriters who identify as LGBTQ+.

The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) has announced playwright and performer R. Forest Malley as the 2025 recipient of its Ryan Hudak LGBTQ+ Dramatic Writing Award, an $8,000 cash grant awarded to one (1) New York State-based playwright or screenwriter who identifies as LGBTQ+. This year for the first time, NYFA recognized five finalists: filmmaker Chheangkea (Brooklyn, NY); director, playwright, and producer Cooper Howell (New York, NY); playwright Nina Ki (Brooklyn, NY); multidisciplinary artist Maleek Rae (Brooklyn, NY); and dramatist and journalist Marcus Scott (Schenectady, NY).

The annual award honors the life and work of playwright Ryan Hudak, who tragically passed away in May 2022 at age 32 after a long battle with Leukemia. In addition to his work as a playwright, Ryan was a theater maker, filmmaker, and a valued member of NYFA’s staff, serving on the executive and development teams.

R. Forest Malley is a playwright and performer from Massachusetts. His work explores memory, migration, violence, queerness, divas, and his Arab and Jewish heritage. He was the winner of the 2024 Goldberg Play Prize for his play French Boy Cigarettes and is a 2025 MacDowell Fellow and Yaddo Resident Artist. His work has also been recognized and supported by Theater Masters (Winner, 2022), Page 73 (Workshop, 2025; Member, 2024 Writers Group; Finalist, 2024 Playwriting Fellowship), The Bay Area Playwrights Festival (Finalist, 2025), The O’Neill National Playwrights Conference (Finalist, 2023 and Semi-Finalist, 2024), and The American Blues Theater (Finalist, 2025). He is currently a member of the SWANA Writer’s Co-Op and a Planet Fitness in Brooklyn. Mally received his BA degree from Harvard University and his MFA degree from NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Said Michael Royce, NYFA CEO: “We are thrilled to recognize R. Forest Malley with the 2025 Ryan Hudak LGBTQ+ Dramatic Writing Award. He is already accomplished in the field, and we hope that this award gives him some additional momentum as he pushes forward in his work. We are excited to see where he goes from here, and are grateful to Ryan Hudak’s parents Pat and Tom for supporting and uplifting new creative voices through this award program.”

Said Malley upon receiving the Ryan Hudak LGBTQ+ Dramatic Writing Award: “This award is a tremendous honor and such a gift—it will allow me to dedicate so much more time to my practice, as well as to attend more theater and performances around the city that can otherwise be cost-prohibitive. I will also be using some of the funds to travel for research for an archive-based project about my father’s parents, who founded a Third Worldist journal in Paris in the early 1970s in service of anti-colonial liberation movements spanning from Algeria to Palestine.”

Funding for this award is provided by Ryan’s parents, Pat and Tom Hudak; individual donors; and the philanthropic community. Those interested in contributing funds to this annual award may donate here. 

About Ryan Hudak:

Ryan Hudak was a gay playwright, theater maker, and filmmaker, proud of his Hispanic and European heritage.

Ryan’s play The Firewatchers won him a scholarship to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where he graduated with an MFA degree in dramatic writing. His play Robbie Alex Cooper was a 2018 finalist in the prestigious Eugene O’Neill playwriting competition. While an undergrad at Long Island University, he was involved in the development of and acted in the play Remembering Antigone, which was awarded a Kennedy Center honor for best reimagining of a classic play.

Ryan wrote to give the LGBTQ+ community more stories that connect them to world history and culture, which he felt has largely been sanitized by today’s culture. Ryan developed and taught a course on the History of gay theater when he attended CMU, which he eventually taught at Lehman College. He would have continued teaching the course at Long Island University except for the fate of his illness.

Ryan’s work came out of his struggles with his sexuality as a young man. He found a connection through fantasy and period novels, tales of outsiders banding together to defeat a foe or families moving through generations. As a result, his plays tended to be set in their own created worlds, pulling influences from gay culture and literature, giving gay characters more complex stories.

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