300 College Drive Sarasota
FL 34243
“A Theater Maker’s Year: What ‘Went Down’” with Playwright & Hermitage Greenfield Prize Winner Aleshea Harris
This event is presented in partnership with the Greenfield Foundation and the Community Foundation of Sarasota County.
Friday, April 8, 6pm
New College Campus Bayfront (entrance at 300 College Drive, Sarasota, FL 34243)
Register here.
Registration is required. $5 per person.
To launch this year’s Hermitage Greenfield Prize Celebration Weekend, 2021 recipient Aleshea Harris returns to Sarasota to share her theatrical journey over the past year and the latest plans for her commission. Focused on the lives of two Black men a century apart, both subject to confinement and surveillance at the hands of western civilization, her work seeks to honor tragedy without losing sight of the levity that just might light a way forward.
Aleshea Harris is the 2021 recipient of the Hermitage Greenfield Prize, awarded in the discipline of theater. Her play Is God Is (directed by Taibi Magar at Soho Rep) won the 2016 Relentless Award, an OBIE Award for playwriting in 2017, and the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award in 2019. It was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and made The Kilroys’ List of “the most recommended un and underproduced plays by trans and female authors of color” for 2017. What to Send Up When It Goes Down (directed by Whitney White, produced by The Movement Theatre Company), a play-pageant-ritual response to anti-Blackness, had its critically acclaimed New York City premiere in 2018, and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award, with additional productions in 2021 at BAM and Playwrights Horizons. Harris was awarded the Windham-Campbell Literary Prize and the Steinberg Playwriting Award in 2020. She has performed her own work at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival; Orlando Fringe Festival; REDCAT, as part of La Fête du Livre at La Comèdie de Saint-Étienne; and Skirball Center in Los Angeles. She is a two-time MacDowell Fellow and has enjoyed residencies at Hedgebrook, Djerassi, and she is now a Hermitage Fellow.