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Ifa Bayeza is an award-winning playwright, director, composer, novelist ,and educator. Her plays include the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award–winning Homer G & the Rhapsodies in The Fall of Detroit; String Theory; Welcome to Wandaland; Infants of the Spring; the musicals Charleston Olio; Bunk Johnson …a blues poem, Kid Zero; and The Till Trilogy (The Ballad of Emmett Till, That Summer in Sumner, and Benevolence). Winner of the prestigious Roy Cockrum Award, The Till Trilogy made its national debut at Mosaic Theatre Company of D.C. in the fall of 2022 with all three dramas running in rotating repertory. Her debut novel, Some Sing, Some Cry, was coauthored with her sister Ntozake Shange. A finalist for the 2020 Herb Alpert Award in Theatre and for the 2020 Francesca Primus Prize, Bayeza in 2018 was the inaugural Humanist-in-Residence at the National Endowment for the Humanities and is the recipient of two commissions from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. A 2022 MacDowell fellow, she is a graduate of Harvard University with an MFA in Theater from University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work has been produced at the Goodman Theatre, Fountain Theatre, Ensemble Theatre, Penumbra Theatre, Renaissance TheatreWorks, Crossroads Theatre, Rites and Reason Theatre, Cosmic Theatre in Amsterdam, as well as at the International Colloquium, “African Americans in Europe” at the Sorbonne, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, DuSable Museum, McVay Museum, Mississippi Museum of Art, the BB King Museum, the National Black Theatre Festival, and the August Wilson Society and the Callaloo Conference at Emory and Oxford. A member of the Executive Committee for the National Black Theatre Summit “On Golden Pond,” Bayeza received two resident fellowships at the Dartmouth College Tuck Business School Minority Business Executive Program and a visiting resident fellowship at the Getty Research Institute, where she moderated “An Evening with August Wilson and the Leadership of the National Black Theatre Summit.”

Her diverse works are driven by a passion to convey the full humanity of Black people and champion the nobility of their struggle against enslavement and its historic and pervasive legacies—to place that generational struggle at the heart of the evolution of human rights, democracy and modernism. Described as “breathtaking,” “staggering,” “extraordinarily lyrical,” and “triumphant,” Bayeza’s literary style and transcendent themes veer from the intimate to the mythic and compel us to reexamine embedded ideas we attach to race, gender, identity, and human purpose.