Spring Gala

Mike Pratt has been the President of the Scherman Foundation for 17 years, joining the Foundation 13 years before as a program officer and investment portfolio advisor. Throughout his tenure, Mike has moved the Foundation’s grantmaking to focus on community organizing, movement-building, systemic change, and racial justice, tapping into his early career as an organizer and civil rights lawyer. The Foundation was particularly involved in strengthening the Environmental Justice movement, both nationally and in New York City, where it provided long-term funding to the struggle to transform the Bronx River and Sheridan corridor, improve mass transit (including Congestion Pricing), pass and implement New York’s ground-breaking Climate Law, and connect community development and climate justice groups. Drawing on his early love of the performing arts—his parents met in summer stock and his wife and children are brilliant creatives—Mike has guided Scherman’s grantmaking to focus on smaller, cutting-edge organizations, particularly those that raise the voices of artists of color and those using art to drive social change. Most recently he has led the Foundation’s grantmaking surge in response to the existential threat of authoritarianism and white supremacy.

“Every time I go to Soho Rep I am struck by the brilliance, the importance, the timeliness of the work from Wolf Play, Fairview, and An Octoroon to Public Obscenities and of course Is God Is. And also by the question—how does Soho Rep make such incredible work time and time again with such a modest budget? While also stretching themselves even further by paying fair wages? Imagine what could be possible at Soho Rep if we could fund it more bountifully.”

Aleshea Harris’ critically-acclaimed play, Is God Is, premiered at Soho Repertory Theatre, won the Relentless Award, an OBIE award for playwriting, and the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award. A film version adapted and directed by Harris is slated for wide release on May 15, 2026 under Amazon MGM’s prestigious Orion label. What to Send Up When It Goes Down was featured in American Theatre Magazine and received a special commendation from the Blackburn Prize. On Sugarland was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist and winner of the Kesselring Prize. Harris has also been awarded the Windham-Campbell Literary Prize, Hermitage Greenfield Prize, Alpert Award, Horton Foote Award, Samuel French Award and an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a two-time MacDowell Fellow and has enjoyed residencies at the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Hedgebrook, SPACE on Ryder Farms and Casa Ecco on Lake Como via the Hawthornden Foundation. She’s been featured in VOGUE and The New Yorker.

Photo by Heather Sten

“Long before the honor of having my work produced at Soho Rep, I knew of the theatre’s reputation for supporting adventurous, groundbreaking artists. It was incredibly meaningful as an out-of-town, barely produced playwright to be shown such trust and belief in Is God Is. Years later, I can confidently say that Soho Rep sets the bar for how artists should be nurtured and how a season should be curated with care and rigor. What a thrill to be celebrated by one of the most vital institutions to our cultural landscape.”