Theatre, Film, and New Multi-Media Division

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Interest Group Awards 2025

Listed here are awards given by the Interest Group to its members. Interests Groups are smaller communities within NCA’s large membership that provide a range of resources including networking opportunities, Annual Convention programming, leadership opportunities, awards, and specialized information dissemination channels, among others.

Read more about this Interest Group.

Lifetime Achievement Award

Year	Award Winner
2015	M. Susan Anthony
2014	James Brandon
2013	Monica Anderson
2012	Jonas Nissen

Mid-Career Award

Year	Award Winner
2015	Noah Lelek
2014	Vicki Crooks
2013	Megan Moe
2012	Patricia Friel
2012	Prairie Endres-Parnell

Top Paper Award

Year	Award Winner
2025	Michelle Miller-Day, “All the World’s a Stage: The Use of Participatory Theatre in Communication Research”
2021	Arthur D. Soto-Vasquez”The Post-Racial Fantasyland of Live-Action Disney Remakes”
2021	Valerie Lynn Schrader”The Case for Katherine Howard: Reconstructing Public Memory of Henry VIII’s Fifth Queen through the Musical ‘Six'”
2019	Valerie Lynn Schrader, “‘Sing Me a Song of a Lass that is Gone’: Public Memory and the Use of Music in the Television Series Outlander”
2019	Josie Ganzermiller, “Creative Persuasion: Enhancing Well-Being and Self-Efficacy Through Theatrical Performance”
2019	Patricia E. Friel, “How Theatre and Animals Help Women Survive Domestic Violence”
2019	Kevin Brown, “Stage, Frame, and Window: Erwin Piscator and Inflections of the Virtual”
2014	Kirt Shineman, “Puppets Appraise the Top Goon: Masasit Mati’s ‘Top Goon’ Puppet Theatre as a Carnivalesque Critique of Syrian President Bashar Assad”

Top Student Paper Award

Year	Award Winner
2025	Phillip Cicero, “Re-Mythologizing AI in the Loneliness Epidemic: Plantonic AI Companions & Communicative Labor”
2021	Sophia Bates”Sharing ‘The Music of My Soul’: A Rhetorical Analysis of Invitational Rhetoric in the Musical Memphis”
2021	Courtney Weikel”‘Talk Less, Smile More’, Exploring Facework through Hamilton’s Lead Characters”
2019	Militant Survival and Black Liberation in Get Out, Erin Victoria Zamora & Kelsey T. Abele Motivation for Theatre Participation: A Study of Extrinsic and Intrinsic Regulation, Megan Westhoff
2019	Anna Wilcoxen, “Surviving the Shadow or Surviving the Guilt: A Semi-Autoethnographic Theoretical Response to ‘In the Shadow of his Language'”
2019	Zachary Sheldon, “God Said ‘You’re Hearing the Voice of the President’: Citizenship in The Trump Prophecy”
2014	Alane Presswood, “’Everybody is in the Labyrinth’: Subverting Gothic Traditions and Rebuilding Terministic Screens”

Debut Paper Award

Year	Award Winner
2013	Serap Erincin, “Connecting to Past Performances: The Technologized Body as Archive and the Reincarnation of the Dead in the Work of the Wooster Group”

Contributed Paper Award

Year	Award Winner
2013	Stephan Christopher Stifano, “Make Belief: Examining Rational and Affective Dimensions of Communication Among Creators of Narrative Film Media”