Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green

Omiyẹmi is a director, dramaturg, and interdisciplinary scholar-artist. Since the inception of the Theatre, Speech, and Dance department in 1926 and its first Black faculty hire sixty years later, Omiyẹmi is the first Black woman to achieve tenure and early promotion to full professor in Theatre. She serves as the inaugural Executive Editor of the Black Theatre Review (formerly Continuum: The Journal of African Diaspora Drama, Theatre and Performance) and was a former president of the Black Theatre Network. Omiyẹmi’s 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).  

Since her arrival in 2010, 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 been jointly appointed in the Program of Africana Studies since 2013 and, at the pleasure of her core colleagues, has directed Africana Studies since 2016. 

Omiyẹmi is the originator and project director for Sitelines BLM with Cadence Theatre Company. Sitelines BLM is an expansion of Cadence’s existing Sitelines initiative, with an exclusive focus on increasing writing and production opportunities for underrepresented artists in historically white institutions.