Playwright.
Director. Activist.
Ifa Bayeza is an award-winning theatre artist, novelist and educator. She works through both a creative nonfiction and fictional lens to explore pivotal intersections of race throughout history. The Till Trilogy interprets the epic saga of Civil Rights icon Emmett Till. Her novel Some Sing, Some Cry, co-authored with her sister Ntozake Shange, chronicles 200 years of African American music through seven generations of women. Her drama String Theory, in a quartet of voices, relives the voyage of the Amistad slave ship and the tragicomedy Welcome to Wandaland, her experience of desegregation in St. Louis post-Brown vs. Board of Education. Musicals include Charleston Olio on the birth of the Jazz Age and Bunk Johnson, A Blues Poem on the life of the legendary Jazz trumpeter. Currently commissioned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, she is collaborating with twelve writers in New Iberia Louisiana to reconstruct the historic narrative of Shadows-on-the-Teche, a former sugarcane plantation. A graduate of Harvard University with an MFA in Theatre from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the 2018 inaugural Humanist-in-Residence at the National Endowment for the Humanities was a finalist for the 2020 Herb Alpert Award in Theatre and for the 2020 Francesca Primus Prize.