![A multi-gendered, gray-haired, African-American lesbian artist poses in front of a bookshelf with a big smile. They are wearing a black shirt and a necklace with a light blue stone.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/48b1e92b-5084-4164-b0ca-df349d823ef4/sharon-bridgforth-headshot.jpg?crop=1080%2C1080%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Portrait photo by David Maziarz.
Sharon Bridgforth
She // Her // Hers, mermaid
Writer and Performing Artist
Inglewood, California
“This year, I've been surprised to discover how much work I've done and how deeply connected I feel — even though the pandemic forced me to slow down, say no, and stay put much more than I ever have in the past.”
Mentored by artists that use art as a vehicle for social justice, Sharon Bridgforth has a long history of bringing people from different backgrounds, life experiences, and artistic aesthetics together for the kind of art making, witnessing, and dialogue that builds loving, strong communities. As a writer, Bridgforth aspires to use the page as a canvas to hold the music that is Black language. Her work is rooted in African-American Southern migration stories that activate African-Diasporic knowings that the past-the present-the future-the living-the dead-and the unborn co-exist. With blues as core to her writing voice, she identifies as a theatrical jazz artist — playing with dissonance, shifting time, calling in all present to respond… to dance, sing, holla, pray, process. To help make the ritual that will bring the jazz of her characters’ worlds to life.
She is a 2022 Winner of Yale's Windham Campbell Prize in Drama, a 2022–2023 McKnight National Fellow, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, and she has received support from Creative Capital, MAP Fund, and the Playwrights' Center. Widely published, she is a New Dramatists alumnae. Bridgforth’s new book, bull-jean & dem/dey back, published by 53rd State Press, is being produced by Pillsbury House + Theatre in Minneapolis.
Donor -This award was generously supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
This artist page was last updated on: 07.12.2024