African-American New York-based playwright Antoinette Nwandu will present a free, public talk as part of the Griot Institute for the Study of Black Lives & Cultures‘ Black Radical Thought & Art Series on Wednesday, Feb. 26, at 7 p.m. in the Elaine Langone Center’s Gallery Theatre.
In June, Steppenwolf Theatre Company presented the World Premiere of her play Pass Over, a mashup of the biblical Exodus story and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which sparked a national conversation about bias in the theater community.
Her play Breach: a manifesto on race in america through the eyes of a black girl recovering from self-hate, about a black woman forced to confront her self-loathing after unexpectedly getting pregnant, received a World Premiere at Victory Gardens in February 2018.
Nwandu is currently under commission from Echo Theater Company and Colt Coeur. Her work has been supported by The MacDowell Colony, The Sundance Theater Lab, The Cherry Lane Mentor Project (mentor: Katori Hall), The Kennedy Center, P73, PlayPenn, Space on Ryder Farm, Southern Rep, The Flea, Naked Angels, Fire This Time, and The Movement Theater Company. She is an alumnus of the Ars Nova Play Group, the Naked Angels Issues PlayLab, and the Dramatists Guild Fellowship.
Honors include The Whiting Award, The Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, The Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, The Negro Ensemble Company’s Douglas Turner Ward Prize, and a Literary Fellowship at the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference. Antoinette’s plays have been included on the 2016 and 2017 Kilroys lists, and she has been named a Ruby Prize finalist, PONY Fellowship finalist, Page 73 Fellowship finalist, NBT’s I Am Soul Fellowship finalist, and two-time Princess Grace Award semi-finalist.
Books will be on sale at this event, which is co-sponsored by Bucknell Film & Media Studies, the Department of Art & Art History and the Department of Theatre & Dance.