Carlyle Brown

Playwright Carlyle Brown

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 Essay, The Fula From America: An African Journey, Talking Masks, Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been…, and Therapy and Resistance. His plays include The African Company Presents Richard III, The Little Tommy Parker Celebrated Colored Minstrel Show, Buffalo Hair, The Beggars’ Strike, The Negro of Peter the Great, Pure Confidence, A Big Blue Nail, Dartmoor Prison, and others.

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 State 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 Department of Theater. 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, Kentucky.

Mr. Brown is a Core Writer of the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, and he is an alumnus of New Dramatists in New York. He has served on the board of directors of The Playwrights’ Center and Theatre Communications Group, the national organization for the non-profit professional theate,r and is a member of the board of 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, a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2010 recipient of the Otto Rene’ Castillo Award for Political Theatre, and 2010 United States Artists Friends Fellowship.

Playwriting credits:

Down in Mississippi, Finding Fish, African Company Presents Richard Iii, Are You Now or Have You Ever Been…, Acting Black, Abe Lincoln and Uncle Tom in the White House, Therapy and Resistance, Talking Masks, the Fula From America: an African Journey, the Masks of Othello: a Theatrical Essay