As the Playwrights’ Center gets closer to finishing its long-awaited new home in St. Paul’s Creative Enterprise Zone, a new creative leader is set to take the reins of the renowned theater-development institution.

In January, Nicole A. Watson was named the center’s next producing artistic director. She replaces Jeremy B. Cohen, who spent 14 years in the role and has since taken the same job at the Ojai Playwrights Conference in California. Watson starts April 1.

The center, founded in 1971, provides significant economic and creative support for both emerging and established artists, and is credited with helping launch the careers of noted playwrights including August Wilson and Suzan-Lori Parks.

Watson currently serves as the associate artistic director at McCarter Theatre Center, on the campus of Princeton University in New Jersey. She has also directed plays around the country and the Twin Cities, including “Blues for an Alabama Sky” at the Guthrie Theater during its 2022–23 season, a production our critic called “an impeccably well-executed piece of theater.”

The Playwrights’ Center, currently based in Minneapolis, has been planning a move to St. Paul — along with a significant expansion — for several years, but financial and pandemic-related delays got in the way.

Now, thanks to a $19 million campaign launched last year, the organization is making significant progress toward gutting and transforming a 1913 industrial building into an accessible, creative space to produce and workshop new plays, leaders say.

The Playwrights’ Center is on track to move into the new home midway through its 2024–25 season, Christopher Bineham, the organization’s advancement director, confirmed earlier this month. A specific date has not been set yet.

“The organization has made an unconditional commitment to supporting writers, and that makes the center a beacon of light in these times,” Watson said in a statement. “I am ecstatic to lead the center in this time of growth and transition, to become a member of and advocate for the artistic community in the Twin Cities, and to support artists and their artistic practice.”

Just as Watson is no stranger to Twin Cities theater, she is also quite familiar with the Playwrights’ Center: She has helped produce shows for the organization in the past and spent extended time there in 2017 and 2018 when her husband, playwright Tim J. Lord, was awarded a Jerome Fellowship.

At the McCarter Theatre Center, Watson has been active in supporting the development of new plays, Playwrights’ Center officials said in a statement. Notably, she launched the Toni Morrison Commissions program, which has supported several artists in creating work informed by the novelist’s personal archives and papers at Princeton.

The Playwrights’ Center has seen steady and significant growth in recent years. Throughout Cohen’s nearly decade-and-a-half-long tenure, he said last year, the number of artists the organization serves annually has quadrupled. Each year, according to the center, around 70 new plays are workshopped and $450,000 is awarded in fellowships and writer support.

The past few months have marked leadership transitions at many respected theater and arts organizations across the Twin Cities. Children’s Theatre Company and Park Square Theatre have both named new artistic directors recently, and Minnesota Opera hired a new principal conductor, filling a several-year vacancy.

Meanwhile, Sarah Bellamy is temporarily stepping down as president of St. Paul’s Penumbra Center for Racial Healing, founded as Penumbra Theatre Company, and Jeanne Calvit is set to retire this month as artistic director of Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts after 27 years.

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