About the Artist

Ifa Bayeza is an award-winning writer, conceptual theater artist, novelist and educator.  Her critically acclaimed drama The Ballad of Emmett Till, received a Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference fellowship and premiered at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 2008, winning the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Play. The Ballad made its West Coast premiere at the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles in 2010, garnering six Ovation Awards, including Best Production; four Drama Desk Critics’ Circle Awards, including Best Production; and the Backstage Garland Award for Best Playwriting. Acclaimed productions followed with the Houston Ensemble Theatre and the National Black Theatre Festival in 2011, Penumbra Theatre in 2014, and Ion Theatre in 2017, where it earned top honors at the San Diego Critics Circle Craig Noel Award, including Outstanding Dramatic Production.

Bayeza has expanded The Ballad into The Till Trilogy, recounting the epic Civil Rights saga now in three distinct dramas: The Ballad, telling the intimate story of the boy’s quest; That Summer in Sumner, chronicling the five-day trial of his killers; and Benevolence, charting the transformation in the Mississippi Delta in the wake of Till’s death. Penumbra Theatre’s 2019 debut production of Benevolence received universally outstanding reviews and was ranked one of the ten “Best in Twin Cities Theatre” by the Star Tribune. Receiving the prestigious Roy Cockrum Foundation award, Mosaic Theatre Company of DC will mount The Till Trilogy in full, with all three plays running in repertory in the spring of 2020. 

Bayeza co-authored with her sister Ntozake Shange, the "gorgeous" (NY Times), "magical" (Elle), “dazzling” (Essence) novel Some Sing, Some Cry, chronicling 200 years of African American music through seven generations of women, “the personal story of a family, but also the story of America” (BookRiot). Bayeza has adapted segments of the book into full length musicals. The first, Charleston Olio, was a Fred Ebb Musical Theatre Award finalist and, with featured artist Phylicia Rashad, debuted at the 2011 National Black Theatre and was reprised by the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the BB King Museum. 

In 2018, Bayeza received a commission from the National Trust for Historic Preservation to create an original musical about legendary jazz musician Will Geary Bunk Johnson to be performed at the Trust’s historic site, the restored Louisiana plantation home Shadows-on-the-Teche. With book and lyrics by Bayeza and combining her original music with melodies from Johnson’s classic recordings, Bunk Johnson, LIVE, at The Shadows premiered at the site in November 2018. The work has since been incorporated into ongoing programming at The Shadows.   

Bayeza received a second commission from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, in 2019 to continue her work at The Shadows. Leading a group of New Iberia, Louisiana residents in a seven-week intensive creative non-fiction workshop, for the first time incorporating the history of African Americans into the programming of the landmark plantation site, Bayeza guided the group through the devised theatre project, “Telling the Full History,” which debuted in November 2019 to a standing-room-only crowd at The Shadows. The work has been reprised four performances the New Iberia community to sold-out crowds, and the workshop has been incorporated The Shadows’ permanent programming.  

In February 2020, Bayeza made her NY directing debut with her new adaptation of Shange’s a photograph / lovers in motion for the Negro Ensemble Company, Inc., and she is currently completing a commission from The Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis and Penumbra Theatre: the Underground Railroad saga One Small Alice. 

Bayeza’s other innovative works for the stage include Homer G & the Rhapsodies in The Fall of Detroit (Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award); String Theory, interweaving a quartet of stories surrounding the L’Amistad slave ship; Welcome to Wandaland, A Fictional Autobiography; and the pioneering Theatre-for-Young-Audiences “math-readiness” project KID ZERO, with music by Bayeza and multiple Grammy-nominee Harvey Mason. Her adaptations for the stage include Wallace Thurman’s inside view of the Harlem Renaissance, Infants of the Spring, a minimalist Antony and Cleopatra from the queen’s point of view, and Ta-zieh-Between Two Rivers, the first English verse translation of the Iranian classic Ta-zieh. 

Bayeza’s work has been performed at New Federal Theatre in New York, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Lorraine Hansberry Theatre and Crossroads Theater. As a performer and lecturer, Bayeza has appeared at the Getty Institute, the Chicago Historical Museum, the Mississippi Museum of Art, DuSable Museum, BRAVA Women’s Center for the Arts, the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian, Cosmic Theater in Amsterdam, and at the Sorbonne. Most recently, she was keynote speaker at Medgar Evers College National Black Writer’s Conference and the 2019 Kentucky Women’s Writers Conference. A graduate of Harvard University with an MFA in Directing and Dramaturgy from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Bayeza was a four-year Distinguished Visiting Scholar and Artist-in-Residence at Brown University and, in 2018, was named inaugural Humanist-in-Residence at the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America.