ATCA and FATCA Helbing Mentorship fellow Billy McEntee co-honoree of 2024-2025 Nathan Award
Billy McEntee, theater editor, freelance writer, theater maker, inaugural ATCA Helbing fellow and current active committee member, was named a co-winner of the 2024-2025 George Jean Nathan Award in February of this year. (The celebratory reception for the winners was recently announced, prompting this tardy posting of the long-announced newest set of awardees.)
According to a February 19, 2026 press release posted on the Cornell University website, the award committee praised McEntee for the “remarkable nimbleness” of his analyses and of his critical analysis that “homes in on key aspects of a production while simultaneously locating it in its historical, aesthetic and political-economic contexts — all in clear and lively prose.” The committee singled out his review of the Broadway production Redwood entitled “On Digital Naturalism” — in which he reflects through examination of that productions projection design “the potentially detrimental effects of digital technology on an audience’s imagination.”
McEntee shares the 2024-2025 Nathan Award with songwriter, voice teacher, and scholar Masi Asare of Northwestern University, honored for her book Blues Mamas & Broadway Belters: Black Women, Voice, and the Musical Stage. The committee particularly noted that Asare’s “meticulous, nuanced analysis of sound and vocal technique as well as of black women’s historical voice pedagogy makes it possible for us to hear the reverberations of intersectional singing practices across American theater culture.”
Conferred by the Chairs of the Departments of English at Cornell, Princeton, and Yale Universities, the Nathan Award is administered by Cornell’s Department of Literatures in English in the College of Arts and Sciences.
The award was endowed by George Jean Nathan (1882-1958) “to encourage and assist in developing the art of drama criticism and the stimulation of intelligent playgoing.” Nathan graduated from Cornell in 1904 and became the leading theatre critic of his era. A reviewer with exceedingly high standards, he co-edited the magazine The Smart Set and wrote over 40 books, including his highly regarded essay collections “The Critic and the Drama” and “The Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan.”
An archive of Nathan’s papers, correspondence, books and related artifacts are held in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections in the Cornell University Library.
Recent Nathan Award winners include Brittani Samuel, Rhoda Feng, Vinson Cunningham, Maya Phillips, Alexis Soloski, and Soraya Nadia McDonald.
– Submitted by Martha Wade Steketee
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