PTC and the Vancouver Fringe Festival are pleased to announce that the team comprised of lee williams boudakian, Anoushka Ratnarajah and Kamee Abrahamian is the winner of the 2017 Fringe New Play Prize for (Untitled) Boxes. The Prize includes a free Mainstage spot at the 2017 Vancouver Fringe, the design and execution of a development process for the play with PTC’s Associate Dramaturg mia amir and production mentoring from PTC.

(Untitled) Boxes is an interdisciplinary and intergenerational performance, created by Anoushka Ratnarajah, Kamee Abrahamian, and lee williams boudakian, that explores the lives and relationships of the Berberian family. Anahit, the family’s matriarch and cultural keeper of knowledge, is in her late 80s and living with Alzheimer’s and Cancer. She has entered the last days of her life, and her illness has progressed to the point that she needs additional care. For the first time in many years, her only daughter and three grandchildren find themselves in the family home again. Marked by generational differences and the impacts of displacement, gender, sexuality and the desire to love each other, their stories reveal a family’s fight to grow closer to one another in the face of great loss and the myriad experiences that threaten to pull them apart.

lee williams boudakian (uses they, them, theirs pronouns) is a queer, trans, Armenian-Liverpudlian mixie with familial & ancestral ties to Lebanon, Syria, what is current-day Turkey, and Liverpool, England. Born in Scarborough, Ontario, and having moved many times, lee currently works as an interdisciplinary artist, writer, producer and facilitator based in Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish lands. lee has trained across artistic disciplines in both institutional and non-institutional settings, and arrives at artmaking as acts of resistance, world&future visioning, and celebration towards liberation and healing. Current love projects include Kalik, ShapeShift Arts, and The HyePhen Mag.

Anoushka Ratnarajah is a queer, mixed race femme of Sri Lankan and British ancestry, and an inter-disciplinary and transnational artist and arts organizer. She has a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and an MA in Arts Politics from NYU. She has worked as a producer, performer, writer and arts organizer with cultural and arts organizations in Vancouver, Montreal and New York. She has been a fellow with The Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics and Voices of Our Nation Arts. Her art practice engages with many social, political and cultural issues, through a critical intersectional lens. She creates work that shines a light on histories and contemporary stories that are underrepresented in mainstream theatre and performance. Her current creative projects include Capital, Alice!, an anti-capitalist, Alice in Wonderland-themed musical; Toasted Marshmallows, a documentary film and community building project exploring what it means to be a mixed-race woman in North America today; and partnered projects with Kalik and Shapeshift Arts, including Dear Armen.

Kamee Abrahamian was born in Scarborough, Ontario to an Armenian family, by way of Beirut, Lebanon; and arrives in the world today as a queer woman and a multidisciplinary producer / artist / facilitator / storyteller. She has a BFA/BA in film and political science from Concordia University (Montreal, Quebec) and an MA in expressive art therapy from the European Graduate School (Saas Fee, Switzerland) — with a special focus on the integration of digital media. The bedrock of Kamee’s arts training is in classical ballet, theatre, and visual art.  In collaboration with fellow artists and allies (lee williams boudakian, Katie Partlow, The Hye-Phen Mag), she continues to develop a body of work inclusive of film, performance, writing, digital art and design (Dear Armen, Alchemy of Waste/Saboteur Productions). Kamee is currently pursuing an MA/PhD  in community, liberation and ecopsychologies at Pacifica Graduate Institute (Carpinteria, California) and is based in Portland, Oregon.

mia, lee, Anoushka, and Kamee have already begun development on the play. It will be on stage at the 2017 Fringe Festival, September 7-17, 2017.