Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green

Professor of Theatre and Africana Studies

Office: Phi Beta Kappa Hall 268, Boswell 104E
Email: [[avgreen]]
Phone: 757-221-2616

Background

Omiyẹmi’s scholarship informs the development and range of courses she offers. For the past fourteen years she has shared her expertise in Black Theater and African American Theatre with students on the William & Mary Theatre Mainstage and in courses such as Black Acting Theory and Performance, African American Theatre History I & II, Theatre in a Post-Racial Age, Reimagining Communities, and single-author courses on August Wilson and Katori Hall. Her direction and production dramaturgy have been seen at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Illinois Wesleyan, Florida A&M, the Afrikana Independent Film Festival (Richmond, VA), eta Creative Arts Foundation, and Cadence, where she originated and now serves as the Project Director for Sitelines BLM. This spring she looks forward to seeing the screening of Sitelines BLM: ACTION at the W&M Arts & Sciences Inclusive Inquiry Speaker Series.Omiyẹmi is the inaugural editor-in-chief of the Black Theatre Review (formerly Continuum: The Journal of African Diaspora Drama, Theatre and Performance), the VP for Professional Development for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and a W&M Provost Faculty Fellow. Her research is published in the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, the Journal of American Folklore, Continuum, the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society Journal Peer Review Section, the August Wilson Journal, August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays (McFarland), and African American Culture: An Encyclopedia of People, Traditions, and Customs (Greenwood). She has forthcoming work in Theater Magazine, Applied Theatre and Racial Justice: Radical Imaginings for Just Communities (Routledge), and August Wilson in Context (Cambridge University Press). Omiyẹmi has earned an Arts & Sciences Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence, a Plumeri Award for Faculty Excellence, a term professorship as the Sharpe Professor of Civic Renewal and Entrepreneurship, and two William & Mary NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Faculty Support. As a W. Taylor Reveley, III Interdisciplinary Faculty Fellow, she collaborated with her long-time colleague, Dr. Amy Quark on developing a community-university partnership, The Local Black Histories Project. Omiyẹmi’s work has been recognized by the Black Theatre Alliance Awards, and funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, CultureWorks, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Omiyẹmi is a graduate of Hampton City Public Schools, William & Mary (B.A. in psychology, 2000), and Virginia Commonwealth University (M.F.A. in theatre education, 2003). Before returning to William & Mary, Omiyẹmi was an associate professor of Communications, Media Arts, and Theatre at Chicago State University, and an Artist-in-Residence with the Black Cultural Center at Purdue University. Since the inception of the Theatre & Dance department in 1926 and the hiring of its first Black faculty member sixty years later, she is the first Black woman and alumna to achieve tenure and promotion to full professor in Theatre.