Artist Bio

(Bio as of February 2012)

Danai Gurira most recently collaborated with the Goodman on The Convert during the 2011/2012 Season. She co-created and performed in the award-winning two-woman play In the Continuum, which premiered off Broadway and toured the United States and southern Africa. For her work on In the Continuum she won a 2006 Obie Award, the 2006 Outer Critics John Gassner Playwriting Award, the 2004 Global Tolerance Award (Friends of the United Nations) and was honored by the Theatre Hall of Fame. In 2007, she received a Helen Hayes Award for Best Lead Actress in In the Continuum at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. Recent acting credits include last summer’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Measure for Measure (2011 Actors’ Equity Joe A. Callaway Award) and on Broadway in Lincoln Center Theater’s production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Ms. Gurira has appeared in the feature films The Visitor (with Oscar-nominated actor Richard Jenkins), 3 Backyards, My Soul to Take (Wes Craven, 2010) and Restless City. She is the title role in the upcoming film Ma’ George. Her television credits include Law & Order, Life on Mars, Lie to Me, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and she has a recurring role on HBO’s Treme. Her play Eclipsed, about Liberian women in war, premiered at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Center Theatre Group’s Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles and Yale Repertory Theatre. Eclipsed won Best New Play at the 2010 Helen Hayes Awards and Ms. Gurira won Best Playwright at the 2011 NAACP Theatre Awards. She was the recipient of the 2008 Theatre Communications Group New Generations travel grant for Eclipsed and has taught playwriting and acting in Liberia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. She is a commissioned playwright with Yale Repertory Theatre. For The Convert (a Center Theatre Group commission) she was awarded the 2011 Barrie and Bernice Stavis Playwriting Award. She received her MFA in acting from New York University, and is currently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. She was born in the US to Zimbabwean parents and raised in Zimbabwe.

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