Leslie Lee (playwright)

Leslie Lee (1930-2014) was an American playwright and Professor of Playwriting. He was formerly Artistic Director of the Negro Ensemble Company.

Lee grew up in West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, and earned a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.A. from Villanova University. He received his initial experience with the professional theater by working at Ellen Stewart's La Mama E.T.C. where his earliest plays were produced. He later taught playwriting at the College of Old Westbury, New York, and the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center in New York. He served as a playwright-in-residence at the University of Pennsylvania. He taught playwriting at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. He taught playwriting at Eugene Lang College at The New School for Social Research in New York City. He was a recipient of grants from the Shubert Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Foundation of the Arts, as well as a playwriting fellowship from the Eugene O'Neill Playwriting Conference in Waterford, Connecticut.

Lee's film credits for public broadcasting include Almos' A Man, an adaptation of a Richard Wright short story starring LeVar Burton; The Killing Floor, which won first prize at the National Black Film consortium; and a co-adaptation (with Gus Edwards) of James Baldwin's novel Go Tell It On The Mountain starring Paul Winfield and Rosalind Cash. Other significant plays include his history play Colored People's Time in which Angela Bassett and Samuel L. Jackson performed, and Hannah Davis. Included among the awards garnered by "The First Breeze of Summer" are an Obie Award for Best Play (1974-5), a 1976 Tony nomination for Best Play, and a John Gassner Medallion for Playwriting awarded by Outer Circle Critics. In 2006, the Negro Ensemble Company produced his play, based on Richard Wright's life in 1930s Chicago, "Sundown Names, and Night Gone Things" starring Stephen Tyrone Williams and Dewanda Wise. In 2008, The Signature Theater company produced a revival of The First Breeze of Summer, directed by Ruben Santiago Hudson, starring Leslie Uggams, Jason and Brandon Dirden (who played Dr. King on Broadway) and Yaya DaCosta (who was featured in Lee Daniels' The Butler). In 2009, he was sponsored by a Likhachev Foundation grant to travel to Russia and complete a screenplay on Alexander Pushkin.

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