Ifa Bayeza is an award-winning conceptual theatre artist,
writer, composer and educator. Her 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 the Ovation Awards’ Best Production; Drama Desk
Critics’ Circle Award for Best Production; and the Backstage Garland
Award for Best Playwriting. Acclaimed productions
followed with the Houston Ensemble Theatre, Penumbra Theatre and Ion Theatre, where
it earned top honors at the San Diego Critics Circle Craig Noel
Awards, 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, on the journey of the boy, Benevolence, on the story of his
killers and That Summer in Sumner on the quest for justice. The
second play Benevolence, which
debuted at Penumbra Theatre in 2019, was finalist for the Francesca Primus
Prize and ranked “Best in Twin Cities
Theatre” by the Star Tribune. Supported by a grant from The Roy Cockrum Foundation, Mosaic Theater Company of DC will open its 2022
season with Bayeza’s long-anticipated three-play cycle. Presented in rotating repertory with a single ensemble cast, this world premiere of The Till Trilogy will be the
first time all three plays are performed
together and a world premiere for That Summer in Sumner.
Other innovative works for the stage include Homer G
& the Rhapsodies in The Fall of Detroit (Kennedy Center Fund for New
American Plays Award); the 2015 Commencement Forum Production at Brown
University, String Theory, on the Amistad slave ship; her adaptation of Wallace
Thurman’s Infants of the Spring, offering the insider’s view of the
Harlem Renaissance; and the musicals: the National Endowment for the
Arts Award-winner Kid Zero; Charleston Olio (Fred Ebb Award finalist)
and Bunk Johnson … a blues poem, commissioned by the National Trust
for Historic Preservation. 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. Currently, Bayeza is a National Trust for
Historic Preservation Artist-in-Residence in New Iberia Louisiana. Commissioned
by Trust’s African America Cultural Heritage Action Fund, she is, with a group
of eleven African American local residents, reimaging the historic plantation home
Shadows-on-the-Teche. African Shadows,
Telling the Full Story will premiere as a digital production and live
performance in 2022.
The 2018 Humanist-in-Residence at the National Endowment
for the Humanities, Bayeza is a graduate of Harvard University with an MFA in
Theater from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.