Local arts leader receives a special honor. Bishop Arts Theatre Center’s Executive Artistic Director, Teresa Coleman Wash, was recently elected to the Dramatists Guild of America Council for the Southern region.
Wash will serve alongside Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Kristoffer Diaz whose Pulitzer Prize-winning play, The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, received a regional premiere at the Dallas Theater Center in 2012, and Timothy Huang, a New York-based writer of new musical theater. Huang’s full-length musical Costs of Living was the recipient of the 2015 New American Musical Award and the 2015 Richard Rodgers Award. Award-winning actress, dramatist, educator, and advocate, Nikkole Salter was also elected to the Council.
Salter is best known for her co-authorship and co-performance (with Danai Gurira) of the Pulitzer Prize nominated play, In The Continuum for which she received an OBIE Award, the NY Outer Critics Circle Award, the Seldes-Kanin fellowship from the Theatre Hall of Fame, and the Global Tolerance Award from the Friends of the United Nations.
This year marked the highest voter turnout in recent DG history. Members of the Guild elected five council members to represent their regions. They are:
- Dan Berkowitz-California, Donna Hoke-New England,
- Gwydion Suilebhan-Mid-Atlantic,
- Teresa Coleman Wash-Southern and
- Doug Post-Northern.
Council members serve a 3-year term and are responsible for providing material for The Dramatist magazine. DG council members are also eligible to be a Tony voter for the Broadway season at the beginning of the next Broadway season.
Wash is a playwright, producer, and Executive Artistic Director at the Bishop Arts Theatre Center, an award-winning multicultural theatre that produces a full season of theater performances, jazz concerts, lecture series, and arts education programs in Dallas, Texas. Select writing credits include The Color Of Love, Been There Done That, Succeeding Beyond The Limits, and Audacity: A Celebration of American History. Her work has been seen in New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Dallas, and Washington, D. C.
She is an MA in Management candidate at Goucher College in Baltimore, MD with plans of graduating in August of this year. Wash participates as a Dallas Morning News Voices columnist and is an alumni of The OpEd Project through the Dallas Public Greenhouses program. She is also the recent recipient of the Dallas Observer’s 2016 MasterMind Award. In September 2013, she was profiled in the Legendary Locals of Oak Cliff and in 2011, she received the Trailblazer Award from the National Association for the Study and Performance of African-American Music.
She serves on the Cultural Tourism Committee for the Dallas Convention & Visitors Bureau, is a former board member for Texans For The Arts, and the current Dallas/Ft. Worth regional representative for The Dramatists Guild of America.
For more information about Teresa and her work, visit www.bishopartstheatre.org.Â
