The ROO Residency, inspired by Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, is designed to remove the systemic and financial barriers that often sideline feminist writers. Bechdel Project , the feminist new play incubator, is proud to announce that acclaimed Broadway playwright Sandy Rustin has been selected as the 2026 ROO Resident . The announcement coincides with Women’s History Month and the anniversary of a watershed moment in feminist history: the 1970 Ladies’ Home Journal Sit-In . During her two-year residency, Rustin will develop a new farce centered on this radical act of defiance, bringing the high-stakes, 11-hour takeover of the magazine’s editorial offices to life for modern audiences. In March of 1970, a coalition of nearly 200 women from Media Women, New York Radical Feminists, the National Organization of Women (NOW), the Redstockings, and Barnard College Students staged a tactical occupation of the Ladies’ Home Journal offices. Protesters targeted the magazine becaus...

Learn more about them and their projects! Ania Upstill - ELLA, ANNIE, & STELLA Long before Ru Paul’s drag race and drag queens ruled the lands of gender performance, male impersonators triumphed on the American and British variety stages. In the late nineteenth century, the hype wasn’t about men dressing as women - it was about women (or at least, female people), dressing as men. These performers were some of the best paid and most in demand of all performers on the variety stages, and their stories have mostly disappeared - until now. Melisa Tien - ANTIDOTES TO PATRIARCHY After travelling to Yunnan, China, and Sumatra, Indonesia, to learn about two thousand-plus-year-old matrilineal societies, how might one create a participatory cultural event that gives rise to a natural inclination—nay, compulsion—to place women at the center of society, that is at once theatrical and authentic, and unique to our corner of the world? Kimberly Senior - THE REINVENTION OF ANNIE BESANT Annie Be...