Raised in Durham, JaMeeka Holloway-Burrell has been a professional theater artist and champion for Black theater in the Triangle for years. She earned her theater degree from North Carolina Central University and continued her education as an apprentice for The Lark Play Development Center, and later, as an assistant director with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and PlayMakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill. An Indy Arts Award winner in 2018, she is a 2019-20 grant recipient of both the Manbites Dog Theater Fund and the Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artists Program. In February 2019, Holloway-Burrell was honored by the African American Heritage Commission and Governor Roy Cooper for her contributions to the arts and culture landscape of North Carolina. She also served as a 2019 theatre panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and for the North Carolina Arts Council. Her directing work has appeared on numerous stages, including: Vermont’s Northern Stage; Shakespeare in Detroit; Classic Stage Company in New York City; Durham’s Manbites Dog Theatre; the Department of Theatre at Dartmouth College; Durham Performing Arts Center; and the National Black Theatre Festival.
JaMeeka Holloway-Burrell will join the department as guest director for the fall mainstage "Citizen: An American Lyric" book by Claudia Rankine, adapted for the stage by Stephen Sachs. The work contains traditional lyric poems interwoven with different forms of text and media into a collective portrait of race relations in the United States.
Theater Studies