Carlyle Brown

Carlyle Brown

Fellow: Awarded 2008
Field of Study: Drama and Performance Art

Competition: US & Canada

Carlyle Brown is a writer/performer and artistic director of Carlyle Brown & Company, based in Minneapolis, which has produced The Masks of Othello: A Theatrical EssayThe Fula From America: An African Journey, and Talking Masks.  His plays include The African Company Presents Richard IIIThe Little Tommy Parker Celebrated Colored Minstrel Show, Buffalo Hair, The Beggars’ StrikeThe Negro of Peter the Great, Pure Confidence, and A Big Blue Nail.  He has received commissions from Arena Stage, the Houston Grand Opera, the Children’s Theatre Company, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Actors Theatre of Louisville, The Goodman Theater, Miami University of Ohio, and the University of Louisville.  He is recipient of playwriting fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, McKnight Foundation, the Minnesota Stage Arts Board, Jerome Foundation, Theatre Communications Group, and the Pew Charitable Trust.  Mr. Brown has been artist-in-residence at New York University School of the Arts Graduate Acting Program, The James Thurber House in Columbus, and Ohio State University Theater Department where he directed his music drama Yellow Moon Rising. He has been a teacher of expository writing at New York University; African-American literature at the University of Minnesota; playwriting at Ohio State University and Antioch College; African American theater and dramatic literature at Carlton College as the Benedict Distinguished Visiting Artist; and "Creation and Collaboration" at the University of Minnesota Theater Department.  He has worked as a museum exhibit writer and story consultant for the Charles Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit and the Kentucky Center for African American Heritage in Louisville.

Mr. Brown is a core member at Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, an alumnus of New Dramatists in New York, and a member of the Dramatists Guild.  He is on the board of directors of The Playwrights’ Center and Theatre Communications Group, the national organization for the nonprofit professional theater, and the Jerome Foundation.  He is a member of the Charleston Jazz Initiative Circle at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina, where his works and papers are archived.  He is the 2006 recipient of The Black Theatre Network’s Winona Lee Fletcher Award for outstanding achievement and artistic excellence.

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