Phylicia Rashad

Phylicia Rashad made her Broadway directorial debut with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Purpose, which won the 2025 Tony Award for Best Play, Drama Desk Award (Outstanding Play), and New York Drama Critics Circle Award (Best Play). Other directing credits include: Our Lady of 121st Street, Blues for an Alabama Sky, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Fences, Gem of the Ocean, A Raisin in the Sun, The Roommate, and Four Little Girls. This marks her third time directing Immediate Family. Producing credits include the 2024 Tony nominated Broadway revival of Ossie Davis’s Purlie Victorious, and the PBS film The Old Settler.

Fondly remembered by television audiences for her portrayal of Claire Huxtable on The Cosby Show, Phylicia Rashad can be seen this season in recurring roles in hit TV series The Gilded Age and Lena Waithe’s The CHI. Film and television credits include: The Beekeeper, Jingle Jangle, Pixar’s Soul, Black Box, A Fall from Grace, Creed, Creed II, Creed III, For Colored Girls, This is Us, Diarra from Detroit, Little America, The Crossover, The Good Fight, David Makes Man, and Empire.



A Theater Hall of Fame inductee (2016) , Ms. Rashad received Tony and Drama Desk Awards for her performances as Faye in Skeleton Crew(2022) and as Lena Younger in A Raisin in the Sun (2004), the Lucille Lortel Award for her performance as Shelah in Tarrell Alvin McCraney’s Head of Passes (2016), and a Tony nomination for her portrayal of Aunt Ester in August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean (2005).



Rashad, who serves as co-chair of the advisory council for the African American Cultural Heritage Fund, is Dean Emerita of the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts at Howard University. She served as Inaugural Dean of the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts and Inaugural Toni Morrison Chair at Howard University. She was also the first recipient of the Denzel Washington Scholar Chair at Fordham University. She holds Honorary Doctorates from Bennett College, Barber -Scotia College, Clark-Atlanta University, Brown University, Providence College, Tuskegee University, Carnegie-Mellon University, Fordham University, Spelman College, Morris Brown College, St. Augustine College, University of South Carolina at Columbia, and Howard University.

Most recently, she directed Immediate Family at Blumenthal Arts.