Birth Place: Chicago, IL
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Erika Dickerson-Despenza is a New Orleans-based Black radical leftist writer, ecowomanist, and cultural-memory worker. Afrosurrealism, Afropessimism, magical realism, narrative re/memory, kinesthetic imagination and Black queer women's interiority and erotic fugitivity are conceptual preoccupations of her work. Erika's primary thematic foci are Black land legacies, Black apocalyptic ritual and environmental racism. Her work occupies sites of intimate reckoning, situating rupture in traditionally sacred or “safe” spaces to make invisible systems of environmental oppression and cultural trauma visible and ultimately ask us to consider abolitionist political ecologies. She is the creator and inaugural resident of The Ntozake Shange Social Justice Playwriting Residency, which supports distinguished women, femme, and non-binary scholar-playwrights of the African Diaspora for two-year terms. Awards: PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award (2023), The Antonyo/ Lorraine Hansberry Kinfolk Award (2023), AUDELCO/Vivian Robinson Best Play Award (2022), Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (2021), Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award (2020), Thom Thomas Award (2020), Lilly Award (2020), Barrie and Bernice Stavis Award (2020), Grist 50 Fixer (2020), Princess Grace Playwriting Award (2019). Residencies & Fellowships: Tow Playwright-in-Residence at The Public Theater (2019-2020), U.S. Water Alliance National Arts & Culture Delegate (2019), New York Stage and Film Fellow-in-Residence (2019), New Harmony Project Writer-in Residence (2019), Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellow (2018-2019), The Lark Van Lier New Voices Fellow (2018). Commissions: Climate Change Theatre Action, The Public Theater, Studio Theatre & Williamstown Theatre Festival. Productions: SHADOW/LAND (The Public Theater, 2023), CULLUD WATTAH (The Public Theater, 2021), [HIEROGLYPH] (San Francisco Playhouse/Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, 2021). Currently, Erika is developing a decalogy traversing the Katrina diaspora rippling in and beyond New Orleans. Together, the ten works explore the politics of disgust, shame and refusal by highlighting the rupture of government intervention at the intersection of capitalism and environmental racism and its impact on dispossessed peoples.
Erika Dickerson-Despenza, cullud wattah
Erika Dickerson-Despenza, cullud wattah
Erika Dickerson-Despenza has written 2 shows including Cullud Wattah (Playwright), shadow/land (Playwright).
Erika Dickerson-Despenza has been nominated for several awards. She has been nominated for Outstanding Play (Drama Desk Awards) for her work on "cullud wattah." Additionally, she has been nominated for the John Gassner Award (Outer Critics Circle Awards) for the same play, "cullud wattah."
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