American playwright Larissa FastHorse to receive the Brandeis Creative Arts Award
September 30, 2025
Brandeis University has awarded its prestigious Creative Arts Award for 2025 to playwright and choreographer Larissa FastHorse. She will receive the award in a ceremony on the Brandeis campus in November.
FastHorse, a member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2020 MacArthur Fellow and co-founder of Indigenous Direction, the nation’s leading consulting company for Indigenous arts and audiences. Her satirical comedy, The Thanksgiving Play, debuted on Broadway in the 2022-2023, making her the first known female Native American playwright to be produced on Broadway. The Thanksgiving Play became one of the top ten most produced plays in America during the 2023-2024 season. A member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, she is the first Native American playwright to have a play on that list. Seattle Rep and Seattle Children’s Theater will premiere her autobiographical coming-of-age play Fancy Dancer, in which she will perform solo, later this month.
The Brandeis Theater Department will present a production of The Thanksgiving Play on the weekend of Nov. 21, in conjunction with FastHorse receiving the award. The Guardian describes the production as “an unsettling work, one that FastHorse engineered to leave audience members with more questions than answers.”
“Larissa FastHorse has established herself as one of the major voices in American theater today,” said Brandeis President Arthur Levine. “In alignment with Brandeis’ founding values of repairing the world, she uses her talents to redefine how Indigenous people and issues are represented in the landscape of American performing arts. We are honored to add her to the renowned list of recipients of Brandeis’ Creative Arts Award.”
"I am so honored to receive this award. I am deeply humbled to have my name included with the list of past winners and look forward to spending time with the Brandeis community," FastHorse said.
The Brandeis Creative Arts Award, supported by the Poses Family Foundation, recognizes excellence in the lives and works of distinguished, active American artists. The award was established in 1956, just eight years after the University’s founding, at a time when there was no comparable award in higher education. Early recipients include poet William Carlos Williams, composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, playwright August Wilson, painter Georgia O’Keefe, writer Grace Paley and choreographer Martha Graham among numerous other top American artists. The most recent awards were given to painter Fred Wilson and violinist Midori.
FastHorse will visit the Brandeis campus to receive the award on Nov. 21, and participate in a panel discussion. She will return to campus in March 2026 for a residency, in which she will engage with students and the Brandeis community through workshops and masterclasses.
Over the past several years, FastHorse has created a nationally recognized trilogy of community engaged plays with Cornerstone Theater Company. The first was Urban Rez, the second project, Native Nation, was the largest Indigenous theater production in the history of American theater with over 400 Native artists involved in the productions in association with ASU Gammage. Their current project, Wicoun, is set in Larissa’s homelands of South Dakota. The trilogy is coming out as a book later this year, Native Nation Project (TCG Books 2025). Her radical inclusion process with Indigenous tribes has been honored with the most prestigious national arts funding from MacArthur, Creative Capital, MAP Fund, NEFA, First People’s Fund, the NEA Our Town Grant, Mellon Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and others.
FastHorse is a professor of practice (literature) at Arizona State University’s Department of English. Her company, Indigenous Direction, recently produced the first land acknowledgement on national television for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on NBC. Along with partner Ty Defoe, their other clients include Roundabout Theater Company, American Association of Arts Presenters (APAP), Western Arts Alliance, The Guthrie, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Brown University, and many more. Their groundbreaking work is redefining Indigenous art representation and education in America.
