Aleshea Harris

Aleshea Harris’s play Is God Is (directed by Taibi Magar at Soho Rep.) won the 2016 Relentless Award, an OBIE Award for playwriting in 2017, the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award in 2019 and was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. It is currently running at the Royal Court Theatre in London (directed by Ola Ince). What to Send Up When It Goes Down, a play-pageant-ritual response to anti-Blackness, had its critically-acclaimed NYC premiere in 2018 (directed by Whitney White and produced by The Movement Theatre Company), was featured in the April 2019 issue of American Theatre Magazine, and received a rare special commendation from the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. The play was subsequently re-mounted at Woolly Mammoth, A.R.T., and BAM. Her newest play, On Sugarland (directed by Whitney White) will premiere at New York Theatre Workshop in the spring of 2022. Awards: Windham-Campbell Literary Prize, Mimi Steinberg Playwriting Award, Hermitage Greenfield Prize, Horton Foote Playwriting Award. Harris is a two-time MacDowell Fellow and has enjoyed residencies at the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Hedgebrook, and Djerassi.

• “Aleshea Harris turns theatre into a monument, ephemeral but real, to ongoing pain. You can’t tear down a statue that never shows up outside.”

  — Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker | Read Full Article

• “Ferociously vital and shouldn’t be missed!”

  — Adam Green, Vogue | Read Full Article