Kate Douglas
(Photo by Stephanie Crousillat)

Princeton University’s High Meadows Environmental Institute, Lewis Center for the Arts, and The Civilians, a New York City-based theater company, have announced the 2024-25 artists of their collaborative initiative, The Next Forever, Kate Douglas and Kate Tarker. The Next Forever is a partnership that seeks to create new stories for a changing planet, exploring how dynamic storytelling can engage vital environmental subjects and provide the vision and inspiration society needs to navigate the challenges of our planet’s future — the “next forever.”

The two artists will spend time on the Princeton University campus as guest artists, engage with faculty and students across disciplines, and participate in an ongoing series of public events and performances over the course of a year-long residency and two-year commissioning agreement. They join last year’s inaugural artists Kareem Fahmy and AriDy Nox, who are continuing to develop the works they began during their residencies last year.

Douglas is a writer, performer, and composer. Her recent work includes The Apiary, nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award; Tulipa through New York Stage and Film; and hag with co-writer Grace McLean through The New Group. She has been awarded residencies at SPACE on Ryder Farm, Swale House on Governors Island, Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, Millay Arts, and Goodspeed Musicals, among others. Her upcoming projects include Centuries starring opposite her co-writers Matthew Dean Marsh and Raina Sokolov-Gonzalez at Ancram Center for the Arts. She holds a certificate in sustainable garden design from New York Botanical Garden.

During her residency, Douglas is conducting further research and developing her new work, If I Forget Thee, O Earth, a full-length play that puts the cosmic and the terrestrial in the context of mass extinction events (present and past) through the lens of astrobiology. In the play, an astronaut and a robot are rehearsing a mission to Mars in the Utah desert that is interrupted by the discovery of fossils. When a paleontologist arrives to assess their significance, it sparks a conflict around the question of habitability and sustainability on Earth and Mars: in this age of mass extinction, whose work is more vital, the futurists’ or the historians’?

Kate Tarker
(Photo by Maura Athari)

Tarker is an American playwright who grew up bilingually in Germany. Her plays include Montag and THUNDERBODIES performed at Soho Rep, Dionysus Was Such a Nice Man at The Wilma Theater and FoolsFURY Theater, and Laura and the Sea at Rivendell Theatre Ensemble.

During her residency, Tarker is conducting further research and developing her new play, Topia, a metafictional journey through optimism, pessimism, and two possible climate futures for Providence, Rhode Island. In the play’s rapidly changing city, two very different women imagine their way into each other’s lives and accidentally open Pandora’s box along the way.

“We are delighted to welcome Kate Douglas and Kate Tarker as this year’s guest artists,” said Gabriel Vecchi, director of the High Meadows Environmental Institute. “At HMEI, we embrace the humanities as essential to a comprehensive exploration of environmental topics. Through their residencies at Princeton, our Next Forever guests are engaging with climate scientists, geochronologists, astrophysicists, ethicists, and political scientists — to inform their works. And we scientists in turn have the novel opportunity to contribute to the development of works in the performing arts that may inform societal perceptions of our future — literally our Next Forever.”

Douglas and Tarker started their residencies this fall.