Kirsten Greenidge | |
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Education | Wesleyan University (BA) University of Iowa (MFA) |
Kirsten Greenidge is an American playwright. Her plays are known for their realistic language and focus on social issues such as the intersectionality of race, gender, and class. Her sisters are the historian Kerri Greenidge and writer Kaitlyn Greenidge. [1]
Greenidge has said that she decided she wanted to be a playwright after seeing August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone at age 12. [2] She attended Wesleyan University and the University of Iowa's Playwright Workshop. [3] From 2007 to 2009, she was part of the Huntington Theatre Company's Playwriting Fellows cohort. [4] From 2006 to 2013, Greenidge was a Resident Playwright at New Dramatists in New York City [5] She is currently associate professor at Boston University, teaching playwriting and mentoring undergraduate students. [6] In 2016, Greenidge began a three-year term as the Playwright in Residence at Boston's Company One Theatre [7] through the National Playwright Residency Program, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered by HowlRound. [8] [9]
Milk Like Sugar is a coming of age play about 16 year old Annie who makes a pregnancy pact with her friends. As she dreams about having a baby and leading a happy life, she soon learns teen pregnancy is not all it's made to be in her head. The play opened Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons Peter Jay Sharp Theatre on October 13, 2011 (previews) and closed on November 27, 2011. It was directed by Rebecca Taichman and starred Tonya Pinkins. The play won a 2012 Obie Awards, Playwriting and Performance, Cherise Boothe and the 2012 Lucille Lortel Award, Outstanding Featured Actress, Tonya Pinkins. [10] [11] Greenidge was partially inspired by news stories in the summer of 2008 about the so-called "pregnancy pact" at Gloucester High School, Massachusetts. [12] The La Jolla Playhouse received the 2011 Round One Edgerton Foundation New Play Awards for Milk Like Sugar. [13]
Luck of the Irish is about an African American family, whose house was bought by an Irish couple in the 1950s and how to the family's dismay the deed may have never been properly transferred. The family must now find the deed, convince the couple not to take the house, or risk eviction. [14] The play had its world premiere directed by Melia Bensussen at the Huntington Theatre Company in March 2012. [15] [16] The play was produced Off Broadway at the Lincoln Center Claire Tow Theater from February 2013 to March 10, 2013. [17]
Greenidge was commissioned the Big Ten Theatre Consortium to write this play in the spring of 2014. [12] [18] After a racial epithet was written on a student's door the entire campus is in social debate about the racial issues taking place in a very contemporary college setting. Issues such as microaggressions, "color blindness" and social segregation are talked about in the play by an ethnically diverse cast. [19] Baltimore was workshopped at the University of Maryland, [18] and then produced in February 2016 at Boston University, in a co-production with New Repertory Theatre and the Boston Center for American Performance. [20]
The New York Times said Luck of the Irish "feels overburdened and overwritten," [17] whereas the Chicago Tribune praised it as "riveting and provocative." [21]
Tonya Pinkins is an American actress and filmmaker. Her award-winning debut feature film Red Pill was an official selection at the 2021 Pan African Film Festival, won the Best Black Lives Matter Feature and Best First Feature at The Mykonos International Film Festival, Best First Feature at the Luléa Film Festival, and is nominated for awards in numerous festivals around the globe. Her web-series The Red Pilling of America can be heard on her podcast "You Can't Say That!" at BPN.fm/ycst
Sheila Callaghan is a playwright and screenwriter who emerged from the RAT movement of the 1990s. She has been profiled by American Theater Magazine, "The Brooklyn Rail", Theatermania, and The Village Voice. Her work has been published in American Theatre magazine.
Lydia R. Diamond is an American playwright and professor. Among her most popular plays are The Bluest Eye (2007), an adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel; Stick Fly (2008); Harriet Jacobs (2011); and Smart People (2016). Her plays have received national attention and acclaim, receiving the Lorraine Hansberry Award for Best Writing, an LA Weekly Theater Award, a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award and the 2020 Horton Foote Playwriting Award from the Dramatists Guild of America.
Ken Urban is an American playwright, screenwriter, director, and musician based in New York. He is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and leads the Music and Theatre Arts Program's dramatic writing program. Urban is also a resident playwright at New Dramatists and an affiliated writer at the Playwrights' Center.
Lucy Thurber is an American playwright based in New York City. She is the recipient of the first Gary Bonasorte Memorial Prize for Playwriting, a Lilly Award and a 2014 OBIE Award for The Hill Town Plays.
Gina Gionfriddo is an American playwright and television writer. Her plays Becky Shaw and Rapture, Blister, Burn were finalists for the 2009 and 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, respectively. She has written for the television series Law & Order, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, FBI: Most Wanted, The Alienist, and House of Cards.
The Huntington Theatre Company is a professional theatre located in Boston, Massachusetts and the recipient of the 2013 Regional Theatre Tony Award, under the direction of Managing Director Michael Maso. It is notable for its longstanding artistic relationship with African-American playwright August Wilson.
Katori Hall is an American playwright, screenwriter, producer, actress, and director from Memphis, Tennessee. Hall's best known works include the hit television series P-Valley, the Tony-nominated Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, and plays such as Hurt Village, Our Lady of Kibeho, Children of Killers, The Mountaintop, and The Hot Wing King, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Lila Rose Kaplan is a 21st-century American playwright. She currently lives in Somerville, MA, where she was a Huntington Playwriting Fellow with the Huntington Theatre Company (2012-2014) as well as a Next Voices Playwriting Fellow with New Repertory Theatre (2015-2016).
Company One is a non-profit theater company located in the Boston Center for the Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, US. The company is known for socially conscious theater programming. Company One has produced more than 50 plays since 1998.
Marcus Gardley is an American poet, playwright and screenwriter from West Oakland, California. He is an ensemble member playwright at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago and an assistant professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Brown University.
Deborah Salem Smith is an American poet and playwright. She is the playwright-in-residence at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island and is a Huntington Theatre Playwriting Fellow.
Kate Snodgrass is an American theater director and playwright. She was the artistic director of Boston Playwrights' Theatre until 2022. She is a professor of the practice of playwriting in the English Department of Boston University. Snodgrass won the 2012 Elliot Norton Award for Excellence.
Marisela Treviño Orta is a third-generation Mexican-American playwright and poet from Lockhart, Texas. She attended the University of San Francisco where she received an MFA in Writing. While she was trained in poetry, Treviño Orta began writing plays after becoming the resident poet for El Teatro Jornalero!, a Latino theatre company which focuses on social justice issues.
HowlRound Theatre Commons is a non-profit service organization based out of Emerson College’s Office of the Arts. Its aim is to support developing theatre practitioners and facilitating dialogue within not-for-profit theatre and performance arts field. Like Wikipedia, their platforms use commons-based peer production as their content methodology.
Aditi Brennan Kapil is an American playwright and screenwriter.
Shalita Grant is an American actress best known for portraying NCIS Special Agent Sonja Percy on NCIS: New Orleans. She is also known from her roles on Mercy Street, You, Santa Clarita Diet, and Search Party.
Rebecca Taichman is an American theatre director. In 2017, she received the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play for Indecent.
Ronan Noone is an American playwright based in Boston, Massachusetts.
Carlos Murillo is an American playwright, director, and professor of Puerto Rican and Colombian descent. Based in Chicago, Murillo is a professor and head of the Playwriting program at the Theatre School at DePaul University. He is best known for his play Dark Play or Stories for Boys.