Antoinette Nwandu is a New York-based playwright who was born and raised in Los Angeles. Her play Pass Over is currently on Broadway (where it is a New York Times Critics Pick). A filmed version of the Jeff Award-winning Steppenwolf production—directed by Spike Lee—premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and at SXSW, and is currently streaming on Amazon Prime. Victory Gardens produced the World Premiere of her play Breach: a manifesto on race in america through the eyes of a black girl recovering from self-hate in February of 2018. Antoinette is a MacDowell Fellow, a Dramatists Guild Fellow and an Ars Nova Play Group alum. Honors include the 2018 Whiting Award, the 2017 Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, the Negro Ensemble Company’s Douglas Turner Ward Prize, a Literary Fellowship at the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference, and spots on the 2016 and 2017 Kilroys lists. Her work has been supported by the Sundance Theater Lab, Space on Ryder Farm, Ignition Fest, the Cherry Lane Mentor Project, the Kennedy Center, Page73, PlayPenn, Southern Rep, The Flea, Naked Angels, Fire This Time and The Movement Theater Company. Antoinette has a bachelor’s degree in English, magna cum laude, from Harvard College; an MS from The University of Edinburgh; and an MFA from NYU Tisch. Antoinette is a writer on the second season of Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It for Netflix, and is under commission from Echo Theater Company, Colt Coeur, Ars Nova and Audible.

Organized by Frank Leon Roberts, Assistant Professor of Theater.

The Revolution Will Be Dramatized: Black Theater Now is a public conversation series organized by the Theater Program at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School. A part of the Lang undergraduate course of the same name, the mission of the series is to introduce students to leading black theater artists, professionals, and practitioners whose work traverses the boundaries of art, politics, and social justice. What is the relationship between black theater and black activism? Moreover, what does it mean to think of black theater as activism? Inspired by the writer Toni Cade Bambara’s famous claim that “the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible” this public facing conversation series invites audiences to think about the ways in which theater---and the arts more broadly--- “matter” to the work of social justice.

All events are open to the public via webinar format and require registration. Zoom link will be sent in advance of the event.