Artist

Suzan-Lori Parks (National Co-producer/Playwright) is a playwright, screenwriter and novelist whose plays include Topdog/Underdog (Public Theater), Fucking A (Public Theater), Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1990 Obie Award for Best New American Play), The American Play (Public Theater), Venus (Public Theater, 1996 Obie Award), The Death Of The Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, and In The Blood (Public Theater, 2002 Pulitzer Prize finalist), among others. Her work is the subject of the PBS Film "The Topdog/Underdog Diaries." She is an alumnae of New Dramatists, and has been awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She was also the recipient of a Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest Award, a CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts (Drama) for 1996 and a Guggenheim Foundation Grant. Her work for film and television includes "Girl 6" (directed by Spike Lee) and the adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, for Oprah Winfrey Presents, which premiered in 2005 on ABC. Her first novel, Getting Mother's Body, is published by Random House. She is currently writing the book for the Ray Charles musical (for the film producers of "Ray"). A recipient of a MacArthur Foundaton "Genius" Award, Parks received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Topdog/Underdog.