2017 Fred Ebb Award Given to Shaina Taub

Raised in the green mountains of Vermont, Shaina Taub is a New York-based songwriter and performer.

Her concert work includes a Lincoln Center solo debut in the acclaimed American Songbook series, as well as residencies at Ars Nova and Rockwood Music Hall. Taub has independently released two EPs and a full-length album Visitorsand will play a year-long residency of monthly shows at the Public Theater’s Joe’s Pub in 2017.

As a songwriter, she is a winner of the Jonathan Larson Grant and the first female recipient of the ASCAP Foundation’s Lucille and Jack Yellen Award. She writes tunes for Sesame Street, including Just Like Magic featuring Sara Bareilles. Six-time Tony winner Audra McDonald is currently performs Taub’s song, The Tale of Bear & Otter on tour. Taub’s songs have also been performed by Broadway stars Sutton Foster and Phillipa Soo.

Taub’s original musical adaptation Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was commissioned by the Public Theater as part of the groundbreaking Public Works initiative and received a critically acclaimed production at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park in which she played the role of Feste. Her original soul-folk opera, The Daughters, was featured in workshop productions at  CAP21 Theater Company, and New York University’s mainstage season. Taub is currently writing a new musical about Alice Paul and the American women’s suffrage movement in the decade leading up to the passage of the 19th amendment.

A fellow of the MacDowell Colony, the Yaddo Colony, the Sundance Institute and the Johnny Mercer Songwriter’s Project, winner of a MAC John Wallowitch Award, a TEDx conference speaker, Taub served on the music theatre faculty at Pace University, and is a University Scholar alumnus of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

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Ebb Foundation 12th Annual Award Winners

2016 Recipients Curtis Moore (left) and Thomas Mizer (right) attend the twelfth annual Fred Ebb Award for Musical Theatre Songwriting in the Penthouse Lounge at The American Airlines Theatre in New York City on November 28, 2016. Photo by Henry McGee

Curtis Moore and Thomas Mizer are a music theatre writing team whose romantic mystery Triangle was originally commissioned by the Williamstown Theater Festival and premiered in 2015 at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley. Their other stage collaborations include The Legend of Stagecoach Mary (NAMT Festival of New Musicals), The Bus to Buenos Aires (Ensemble Studio Theatre) and, with collaborators Amanda Green and Matthew Brookshire, For the Love of Tiffany (New York Fringe Festival).

Among those who participated in the selection panel for this year’s Ebb Award were lyricist Sheldon Harnick, actress Andrea Burns, and playwright Tim Pinckney. Established in the memory of Broadway lyricist Fred Ebb, one half of the Kander & Ebb duo (Curtains, Chicago), the award has previously been awarded to such songwriters and songwriting teams as Sam Wilmott, Michael Kooman & Christopher Diamond, and Jeff Blumenkrantz.

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