Artist Bio

(Bio as of March 2017)

Named one of Time magazine’s “100 Innovators for the Next New Wave,” in 2002, Ms. Parks was the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for her Broadway hit Topdog/Underdog. A MacArthur “Genius” Award and Gish Prize recipient, she has also been awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her play Father Comes Home From The Wars (Parts 1, 2, & 3) made its world premiere at The Public Theater in New York, followed by a run at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA, and Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles. The play was named a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was awarded the 2015 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History, as well as the 2014 Horton Foote Prize. Ms. Parks’ work on The Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess was honored with the 2012 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical. Her numerous plays include The Book of Grace, In the Blood (2000 Pulitzer Prize finalist), Venus (1996 Obie Award), 365 Days/365 Plays and The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, among others. Ms. Parks’ novel Getting Mother’s Body was published by Random House. Her first feature-length screenplay was Girl 6, written for Spike Lee. She’s also written screenplays for Brad Pitt, Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster, as well as adapting Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, which premiered on ABC’s Oprah Winfrey Presents. Ms. Parks is currently writing an adaptation of the film The Harder They Come for a live stage musical. She is the master writer chair at The Public Theater, A Residency One playwright at Signature Theatre and serves as a professor in dramatic writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.