HIGHLIGHT: Panelist: Renee Harrison PhD

Contemporary Black Female Playwrights and Directors

Renee K. Harrison is a native of Los Angeles, CA, and an Associate Professor of African American and U.S. Religious History at Howard University School of Divinity. She is also the creator, producer, and director of A Requiem for Black Bodies, which is a contemporary urban production that commemorates Black individuals traumatized by racism and violence in the United States. The Requiem serves as a call to remembrance, reflection, healing, ongoing engagement, and action. Traditionally, a requiem is a solemn chant, drumming, dirge, or song for souls’ repose (resting). 

Renee is a former 11-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department and was the founder and former Executive Director of A Leap of Faith Productions, a 501(c)(3) non-profit community and faith-based theater company in Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. in Religion with concentrations in Philosophy, History, Womanist and Black Feminist Thought, and African American Studies from Emory University (Atlanta, GA). Renee has directed, produced, and written or adapted over 15 stage productions during her lifetime.  A Requiem is scheduled for performance at Judson Community Church in New York in June 2024. 

The performance will be sponsored by Nurturing Justice, a non-profit organization committed to taking sustained action and promoting education that is necessary for dismantling personal and systemic inequities in America. Renee’s most recent book, Black Hands, White House: Slave Labor and the Making of America, examines the enslaved Black people who played in building the nation’s capital, Washington, DC.(Fortress Press, 2021).