 |
 |
|
|
|
Kia Corthron was born in Cumberland, Maryland, a small town walking distance to West Virginia, and has lived in New York City for eighteen years, the last twelve in Harlem. She is primarily a playwright. Her many plays, including Breath, Boom which focuses on girl gangs in the Bronx, have been produced in NYC, London, and across the U.S. — Los Angeles, Chicago, Baltimore, Minneapolis, Kentucky, Alabama and elsewhere. She has addressed various topics in her work, among them the mainstream media, the black community and the NYPD, national health insurance, environmental racism, the homeless community, Wal-Mart, sweatshops, reproductive rights, human cloning, a children's play about the relationship between an African-American girl and a Somali immigrant girl. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays award, and the AT&T On Stage Award. She has led playwriting workshops at the graduate and undergraduate level, as well as in NYC public high schools and in venues for incarcerated women and the high school for incarcerated girls on NYC's Riker's Island. In 2002 she traveled with five other playwrights to Palestine, visiting theatres on the West Bank and Gaza. She was one of nine American playwrights selected by Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater for a special world travel/play commissioning grant. Kia chose to travel to Liberia in 2004 while the country was coming out of its brutal civil war, and has since been working with the theatre on her play Tap the Leopard, chronicling the historical relationship connecting the U.S. and Liberia, from the initial tensions between immigrant American free blacks and the majority native population in the 19th Century through the strife of the late 20th and 21st Centuries. Previously Kia wrote for Tom Fontana's series The Jury.
|
|
|
|
|
|
