In awarding the 2026 honorary degrees, President Maurie McInnis read the following personalized citation.
Penetrating playwright who is the only woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for drama twice, when you write, the stage becomes a place of witness and moral clarity. With rare empathy and insight, you bring to light lives too often overlooked, rendering them with dignity, complexity, and voice. Your plays, including Sweat and Ruined, do more than tell stories; they excavate the hidden structures of power, memory, and survival that shape our world. You listen carefully, write fearlessly, and insist that theater remains a living forum for justice and recognition.
Dazzling dramatist, whose efforts through the stage have enlarged our capacity to see the humanity in one another, we take this stage today to confer on you your second Yale degree, Doctor of Letters.
Lynn Nottage is an American playwright and screenwriter whose work fuses lyrical storytelling with rigorous social inquiry, illuminating the lives of individuals often pushed to the margins of society. She is a professor at Columbia University School of the Arts, where she recently received the Lenfest Distinguished Professor Award, and A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for drama, Nottage is celebrated for plays that braid intimate character portraits with larger histories of labor, gender, race, and resilience. Across stages in the United States and abroad, she has expanded what contemporary American theater can hold and whom it centers.
Raised in Brooklyn, Nottage came of age with a keen ear for the cadences of everyday speech and a deep respect for community memory. Her parents, an educator and social worker, often took her to the theater to see the works of African American playwrights, and she was drawn to it as a means of self-expression. While at the High School of Music and Art in Harlem, she wrote her first play, The Darker Side of Verona, about an African American Shakespeare company traveling through the South. She attended Brown University, originally intending to study medicine, but was encouraged by her professors to pursue her art, earning a bachelor’s degree in American literature and creative writing. She then attended the Yale School of Drama, earning her MFA, an experience she has described as foundational: the place where she found her voice. After graduation, Nottage worked in Amnesty International’s press office while writing plays in her spare time.
As her reputation grew, she drew the attention of theaters nationwide: Poof! premiered at Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1993, the political satire Por’Knockers opened Off-Broadway in 1995, and Crumbs from the Table of Joy debuted at Second Stage Theater in 1995. Her major breakthrough came with Intimate Apparel (2003), followed by Fabulation (2004) and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Ruined (2009), shaped by interviews with women in Ugandan refugee camps about sexual violence during the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Since then, her plays have been staged extensively across the United States and internationally, earning numerous accolades including an Evening Standard Award, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Dramatic Critics’ Circle Award, and three Obie Awards. Recent projects include the libretto for This House, which premiered at Opera Theatre of St. Louis and was recognized as a finalist for the 2025 International Opera Awards; an opera adaptation of Intimate Apparel at Lincoln Center Theater, which received Drama Desk Award nominations; the book for the Tony-nominated Broadway musical MJ the Musical; and the Tony-nominated Clyde’s, produced on Broadway at Second Stage Theater. Her acclaimed body of work also includes Sweat, which received the Pulitzer Prize, an Evening Standard Award, and Tony and Olivier Award nominations; Mlima’s Tale; By the Way, Meet Vera Stark; Las Meninas; and the musical adaptation of The Secret Life of Bees. Whether dramatizing labor and its indignities, the aftershocks of violence, or the delicate textures of friendship, longing, and survival, Nottage’s work insists that attention itself can be an act of justice.
Nottage serves as an artistic associate at The National Theatre in London and is the co-founder of the production company Market Road Films. Her honors include induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Laura Pels Master Playwright Award, The Merit Medal and Literature Award from The Academy of Arts and Letters, and a MacArthur Fellowship. She holds honorary doctorates from the Rhode Island School of Design, The Juilliard School, and Brown University. She resides in New York with her husband and two children.
