ATCA Medina Award winner Brittani Samuel wins 2023-24 Nathan Award
Brittani Samuel, a freelance theater critic who writes for The New York Times, The Washington Post and Broadway News, and was the 2022 inaugural winner of ATCA’s Edward Medina Prize for Excellence in Cultural Criticism, has been named winner of the 2023-24 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.
According to the February 18, 2025 press release posted on the website of the Cornell Chronicle, the award committee praised Samuel for her “impressive breadth of address to the playgoing public,” foregrounding “the critic’s own social position in an effort to promote more thoughtful and empathetic theatergoing.” The committee singled out her review of Raja Feather Kelly’s dance theater piece “The Fires,” published in The New York Times, as exemplifying Samuel’s critical acumen and distinctive voice.
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 Rhoda Feng, Vinson Cunningham, Maya Phillips, Alexis Soloski, and Soraya Nadia McDonald.
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