Carlyle Brown
Andrew W. Mellon Playwright-in-Residence
Carlyle Brown [photo credit: Lauren B Photography]
Andrew W. Mellon Playwright-in-Residence
Carlyle Brown is a playwright/performer, curator and artistic director of Carlyle Brown & Company based in Minneapolis. His plays have been produced at theatres across the country and internationally. His shows produced at Illusion include Finding Fish, Acting Black, A Play by Barb and Carl, History of Religion and during the Covid years, a virtual performance of Down in Mississippi. Other Twin Cities productions include Little Tommy Parker’s Celebrated Colored Minstrel Show and The African Company Presents Richard III at Penumbra Theater, Beggars’ Strike at the Children’s Theater Company, the Mixed Blood production of Pure Confidence that moved to off Broadway in New York, American Family at Park Square Theater. Other plays that have been produced across the country include The Negro of Peter the Great, A Big Blue Nail, Dartmoor Prison, The Pool Room, Yellow Moon Rising, Down in Mississippi, Are You Now or Have You Ever Been... He is an alumnus of New Dramatists and a Life Time Core Writer at the Playwrights’ Center. He has received numerous commissions, fellowships and awards including:
2022 Legacy Award from the Legacy Playwrights Initiative which recognizes established American playwrights for their sustained influence on the American theatre in hopes of bringing renewed attention to their body of work
2019 Hellen Merrill Award recipient
2018 William Inge Award for Distinguished Achievement in the American Theater
2010 Otto Rene Castillo Award for Political Theatre, a 2010 United States Artist Fellowship
2009 Guggenheim Fellowship
2006 Black Theatre Network’s Winona Lee Fletcher Award for outstanding achievement and artistic excellence
A scholar and historian, Brown has been an artist in residence or visiting professor at several colleges and universities and has worked as a museum exhibit writer and story consultant.
He curated the 2018 and 2022 Cultural Diaspora Residency at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France and The Afro-Atlantic Playwrights’ Festival at The Playwrights’ Center July 12-14, 2019 and with Chuck Mike will be co-curating The 2023 Afro-Atlantic Playwright Festival October13-15 in Minneapolis. .
His solo shows include The Fula from America: An African Journey, Therapy and Resistance, Acting Black: Demystifying Racism created to inspire open and honest conversations about race and diversity, and History of Religion..
Click here to read Carlyle’s article about the journey of the play We Take Care of Our Own by Zainabu Jallo on the Howlround Theatre Commons website.
Read a conversation with Carlyle Brown, Elaine Romero, and Catherine Filoux as they share "Playwright Caregivers."