Student Spotlight: Caroline Hull’s Lifeline
Augsburg MFA student Caroline Hull is being recognized on a national stage for her one-act play Lifeline. Hull’s work was recently selected to advance through the KCACTF Region V Playwriting Festival and onto the National competition. She also received a performance award for her work in the staged reading at the regional festival.
Encouraged by faculty and colleagues to submit her work, Caroline took the leap — and found not only recognition, but a broader platform for her voice. Receiving the award affirmed something she already believed about storytelling: that if a piece of writing reaches even one person, it matters. For her, it’s more about what the play represents: a willingness to take creative risks, to write from lived experience, and to offer something deeply human to audiences who may need it.
Lifeline began quietly, as personal writing. Caroline first turned to the page as a way of coping, and over time those early journal entries grew into something larger — a script shaped by love, illness, friendship, and resilience.
“It developed and changed into a love letter,” she shared, “to the life I’m able to have, and the friends who love me through it.”
That transformation, from private reflection to shared story, is at the heart of Caroline’s work as a playwright. Lifeline is not only a piece of theater, but an act of openness: a reminder that art can hold both grief and joy at once, and that vulnerability can be its own form of strength.
Presenting the play at the festival in Rochester, Minnesota required stepping into that vulnerability in a new way- especially during a 
Minnesota winter which offered a vastly different experience for this Florida resident who has attended our summer residency in July!
Caroline performed in the staged reading herself, alongside Augsburg graduate Logan Rodgers and fellow MFA student Jeff Redman. This is a reflection of how the MFA program provides more than artistic development. It is also a foundation of writers and artists who show up fully for one another- offering feedback, partnership, reassurance, and sometimes even performance support!
“Augsburg has given me this unreal, incredible foundation of creatives and playwrights,” she reflected. “It has given me a family… It’s given me a home.”
At Augsburg, we are proud not only of Caroline’s achievement, but of the courage behind it — the choice to write honestly, to take risks, and to create work that expands the stories we tell and the experiences we make room for onstage.
As she looks ahead, her next step is simple and steadfast: to keep writing, one day at a time, pencil in hand.
Congratulations to Caroline Hull — and to the spirit of brave, meaningful storytelling that continues to thrive within Augsburg’s MFA community.