Our Next Now
Our Next Now
  • Home
  • Omi & Sharon
    • Why Our Now Next
    • Omi
    • Sharon
  • Offerings
    • Called By Water
  • Contact Us
  • More
    • Home
    • Omi & Sharon
      • Why Our Now Next
      • Omi
      • Sharon
    • Offerings
      • Called By Water
    • Contact Us

  • Home
  • Omi & Sharon
    • Why Our Now Next
    • Omi
    • Sharon
  • Offerings
    • Called By Water
  • Contact Us

Sharon bridgforth

(she/Mermaid/they)

Sharon Bridgforth

collaborates with interdisciplinary artists, and audiences to install moving soundscapes of her ritual/jazz texts. Through works that celebrate African-American Southern Migration histories/queerly, she strives to embody the unbending dignity, commitment to community, self-determination and Love of Black cultures. 

"Writing is my way of using the page as a canvas to hold the music/that is Black language. In bringing that music to life, my longing is to be as good at activating stories as my family. All of my work is a conjure in honor of them.” 


- Sharon

A 2022 Winner of Yale's Windham Campbell Prize in Drama, Sharon is 2020-2023

Playwrights Center Core, a New Dramatists alumnae and in 2025 she was inducted in the Texas Institute of Letters.


She has received support from:

  • The Doris Duke Performing Artist Award
  • USA Artists
  • Creative Capital
  • MAP Fund
  • Playwrights’ Center Core Membership
  • McKnight National Fellowship
  • National Performance Network


Widely published, her work is featured in: 

  • Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature 
  • Mouths of Rain an Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought
  • Volume 110, No. 4 Winter 2022 The Yale Review
  • Feminist Studies Vol 48  Number 1, honoring 40 years of This Bridge Called my Back and But Some of Us Are Brave!


Sharon's book, bull-jean & dem/dey back is published by 53rd State Press (2022) and features the bull-jean stories (originally published in 1998 by RedBone Press) and the new piece bull-jean/we wake.


Sharon's dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/The Show is streaming on the Twin Cities PBS platform.


MORE AT: SHARONBRIDGFORTH.COM

My life’s work is to offer art and art-based processes that are rooted in healing - that use Black traditions to bring people from different backgrounds together for transformational experiences.


Sharon

Sharon is a company member at Pillsbury House Theatre in Minneapolis and 

has served as Artist In-Residence for:

  • The NoVo Foundation
  • Thousand Currents
  • allgo, a Texas statewide queer people of color organization
  • Brown University’s MFA Playwriting Program
  • University of Iowa’s MFA Playwrights Program
  • The Theatre School at DePaul University
  • The Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. 


Sharon has taught for The University of Texas at Austin African & African Diaspora Studies Department, and served as a dramaturg for: 

  • the Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center Initiative’s Choreographic Fellowship program
  • Maria Bauman-Morales’, Desire: A Sankofa Dream
  • Ni’Ja Whitson’s, Dark Matter Cypher Residency of The Unarrival Experiements
  • Rebecca Mwase & Ron Ragin’s workshop of Vessels at June Bug Productions. 


Sharon was writer and dramaturg for Ananya Chatterjea Dance Theatre’s, Dastak: I Wish You Me; and served as Embedded Writer for Marjani Forte-Saunders’s Memoirs of a…Unicorn residency at Florida State University in Tallahassee at the The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography in partnership program with the Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center Initiative’s (CCI) Choreographic Fellowship program.

Sharon is Executive Producer and host of, Who Yo People Is, a podcast series that gives space to artists whose Work and artistic practices are rooted in serving our communities through healing/Spiritual and cultural traditions – centered in Love. 

Sharon’s publications include: 

  • bull-jean & dem/dey back and love conjure/blues.
  • Sharon is co-editor, with Omi Osun Joni L. Jones and Lisa Lzynn Moore, of Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project. 
  • Sharon’s River See Theatrical Jazz Performance Installation script is published in Obsidian Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Issue 43.1
  • delta dandi, is published in solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews and essays
  • the love conjure/blues Text Installation is in Blacktino Queer Performance. Her work is featured in: Volume 110, No. 4
  • Winter 2022 The Yale Review
  • Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature edited by Ana-Maurine Lara and drea brown
  • Mouths of Rain an Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought edited by Briona Jones;
  • the creative contribution section of Feminist Studies Volume 48 Number 1 honoring 40 years of This Bridge Call my Back and But Some of Us Are Brave! curated by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

"My work is rooted in encouraging people to explore their identities, cultures, family histories and dreams...to tell the stories they are most afraid to tell...to employ individuality with rigor as they sharpen their artistic/activist voices as they expand their tool kits...and to serve as witnesses for each other in the process.  This is the work of Spirit, the stuff that Vibrant change is made of."  


⎯  Sharon

Copyright © 2022 Our Next Now - All Rights Reserved.

Powered by

This website uses cookies.

We use cookies to analyze website traffic and optimize your website experience. By accepting our use of cookies, your data will be aggregated with all other user data.

Accept