Kimberly Dixon-Mays biography

Kimberly Dixon-Mays

At Writers Theatre: Pearl's Rollin' With the Blues

Kimberly Dixon-Mays is a poet and playwright. Her plays have received readings and staged productions at theaters including Crossroads Theatre Company, Plowshares Theatre Company, Windy City Playhouse and Rivendell Theatre. In addition, from 2005-2013 she was a recurring member of the Guild Literary Complex’s devised theater project the Poetry Performance Incubator (Artistic Director Coya Paz), co-creating and performing in its original works Tour Guides and Like Bread.

Among other theater honors, Kimberly’s play The Gizzard of Brownsville was a 2002 finalist for the Theodore Ward Prize for African-American Playwrights. (Nine) was a featured reading for Congo Square Theatre Company’s 2019 August Wilson New Play Initiative, and a semi-finalist for the 2019 Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. Last Will was selected for Mad Cow Theatre’s 2020 Women’s Voices Mini-Festival.She was also a semi-finalist for 2020 National Black Theatre I Am Soul Playwright Residency and recipient of NBT's Soul Series Lab Playwriting Micro-Development Session.

Kimberly is a 2018-20 Russ Tutterow Fellow with Chicago Dramatists. She holds a B.A. in Psychology/Theater Studies from Yale, an M.A. in Afro-American Studies (playwriting concentration) from UCLA and a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Theatre/Drama from Northwestern.

[Bio as of November 2020]