Alice Eve Cohen Was Awarded a 2025 NYSCA Individual Art Theatre Commission Grant
Alice Eve Cohen (Faculty) was awarded a 2025 NYSCA Individual Art Theatre Commission grant for $10,000 for her play Oklahoma Samovar. The NYSCA granted a total of $62 million to support 1,497 nonprofit organizations and 509 individual artists, increasing access to arts funding and recognizing the substantial economic and social impact of New York’s vital arts and culture sector.

Alice’s play takes place in 1887 and follows two Latvian teenagers, Jake and Hattie, who flee the Russian Army and become the only Jews in the Oklahoma Land Rush. A hundred years later, their ninety-year-old daughter Sylvia reinvents their story of five generations in a Jewish pioneer family, traveling East to West and then West to East, staking their claims in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Coney Island, putting down roots and digging graves, embodying their own Jewish variations on the mythologized and turbulent American Dream–an utterly human and absolutely unique American story, based on real events.
Learn more about Oklahoma Samovar here.