Sharon Bridgforth

Early life

Bridgforth was born in Cook County Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, and moved to South Central Los Angeles when she was 3 years old. She discovered the diversity of the city during her long bus commutes to school.

Career

From 1993 to 1998, Bridgforth worked as the founder, writer, and artistic director of the root wy’mn theatre company. root wy’mn’s touring roster included: the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, The Theater Offensive in Boston, La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, California and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

From 2002 to 2009, she served as the anchor artist for the Austin Project, produced by Omi Osun Joni L. Jones and the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, University of Texas at Austin. Her work, "Finding Voice Facilitation Method" was published in Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project edited by Osun Joni L. Jones, Lisa L. Moore, and herself.

In 2008, Bridgforth received a National Performance Network Creation Fund award, for delta dandi, co-commissioned by Women & Their Work, in partnership with the National Performance Network. Freedom Train Productions in New York presented a reading of the work in 2008. A workshop production of the work was produced in 2009 at the Long Center in Austin, Texas.

At Northwestern University, as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation artist-in-residence in the Performance Studies department, Bridgforth presented a workshop production of delta dandi during the 2009 Solo/Black/Woman performance series. Since 2009, Bridgforth has been resident playwright at New Dramatists, New York. Her work blood pudding, was presented in the 2010 New York SummerStage Festival.

She is the 2010–2012 Visiting Multicultural Faculty member at the Theatre School at DePaul University and is the curator of the Theatrical Jazz Institute at Links Hall, produced by the school, Links Hall and herself.

Roell Schmidt is producing Bridgforth’s newest work, River See.

the bull-jean stories

Published by RedBone Press, the bull-jean stories give cultural documentation and social commentary on African-American herstory and survival. Set in the rural South of the 1920s through the 1940s, the bull-jean stories uses traditional storytelling and nontraditional verse to chronicle the course of love returning in the lifetimes of one woman-loving-woman named bull-dog-jean.

Love Conjure/Blues

Both a performance and a novel, Love Conjure/Blues places the fiction-form inside a traditional Black American voice, inviting dramatic interpretation and movement within a highly literary text: It is filled with folktales, poetry, haints, prophecy, song, and oral history. Love Conjure/Blues was also published by RedBone Press.

Awards, residences, and grants

In 1997, Bridgforth’s script no mo blues was nominated for an Osborn Award (sponsored by the American Theatre Critic’s Association). The bull-jean stories won a Lambda Literary Prize for “Best Book by a Small Press” in 1998. The collection also received a nomination for a Lambda Literary Prize in the category of “Best Lesbian Fiction” and a nomination from the 1998 American Library Association for “Best Gay/Lesbian Book”. Bridgforth was nominated for the 2002-2003 Alpert Award in the theatre category. She has received the 2000 Penumbra Theatre (St. Paul, MN) Playwriting Fellowship and 2001 YWCA Woman Of The Year in Arts Award in Austin, Texas.

A recipient of the 2008 Alpert/Hedgebrook Residency Prize, her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts commissioning program; the National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group, playwright-in-residence program; National Performance Network commissioning and community fund; the Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media; and the Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Production Fund Award. Bridgforth was also the recipient of the Creative Capital Performing Arts Award in 2016.

Personal life

She has a daughter, Sonja Perryman, from a past marriage. A lesbian, her partner is Omi Osun Joni L. Jones. Jones also has a daughter, Leigh Gaymon-Jones, from a past marriage.

Selected Publications

Albums

Theater pieces