(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.
A 2022 Winner of Yale's Windham Campbell Prize in Drama, Sharon is 2020-2023
Playwrights Center Core and a New Dramatists alumnae.
She has received support from:
- The Doris Duke Performing Artist Award
- 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 is Executive Producer and Host of the Who Yo People Is podcast series and her dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/The Show is streaming on the Twin Cities PBS platform.
Sharon 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.
"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