Omiyemi (Artisia) Green

Background

Omiyẹmi’s scholarship informs the development and range of courses she offers. For the past thirteen 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 Illinois Wesleyan, Florida A&M, the Afrikana Independent Film Festival (Richmond, VA), eta Creative Arts Foundation, and Cadence, where she serves as the Project Director for Sitelines BLM. This fall, she looks forward to joining the faculty and students at Southern Illinois University Carbondale as director for Alice Childress’ Wedding Band. 

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 two William & Mary NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Faculty Support, a Plumeri Award for Faculty Excellence, a W. Taylor Reveley, III Interdisciplinary Faculty Fellowship, a WMSURE Mellon Faculty Fellowship, an Arts & Sciences Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence, and a term professorship as the Sharpe Professor of Civic Renewal and Entrepreneurship. She has earned $230K in external and internal awards for her teaching and research, and creative work. Her 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. 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. 

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.