Joyce Award Winners

Zakiyyah Alexander, Imani Uzuri and Penumbra Theatre

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Penumbra Theatre

Zakiyyah Alexander and Imani Uzuri received a Joyce Award with the Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul, Minn., to stage, GIRL Shakes Loose Her Skin, in the spring of 2017. The play represents new territory for the theater with themes of LGBT rights and social change under the new direction of Sarah Bellamy, who takes over artistic director duties from her father, Lou Bellamy.

Zakiyyah Alexander is a prolific playwright whose work has been produced by a range of mid-sized theaters – including Greenwich Street Theater, ACT – A Contemporary Theater, Classical Theater of Harlem, Hartford Stage and more. She has won many awards including the Lorraine Hansberry Prize, is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, and most recently was a writer for Grey’s Anatomy.

Imani Uzuri is a composer and lyricist and has been called “a post-modernist Bessie Smith” by the Village Voice and “one of the top emerging female composers” by the New Yorker. She is also 2015 Park Avenue Armory Artist-in-Residence.

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