Robert O'Hara

Robert O'Hara is an African American playwright and director. He has written Insurrection: Holding History and Bootycandy.Insurrection is a time traveling play exploring racial and sexual identity.Bootycandy is a series of comedic scenes primarily following the character of Sutter, a gay African American man growing from adolescence to manhood. It won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Drama.

O'Hara was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. Growing up, he lived with his mother, who had him when she was seventeen, and his step-father, who moved in when O'Hara was twelve. In the third grade, he began attending Catholic school, where he found himself one of the few African-American students there. He later attended Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, and graduated in 1992. Initially he came to the school major in Political science and become a lawyer. However, he quickly realized he was much more interested in theatre, and changed his major to Drama. At Tufts he started the Tufts Black Theatre Company, for which he directed and wrote work. After graduating from Tufts, he then went on to pursue a master's degree in Directing at Columbia University, which he completed in 1996. During his time at Columbia, O'Hara interned at the Manhattan Theatre Club and the Joseph Papp Public Theater, where he was mentored by notable African-American playwright George C. Wolfe, author of The Colored Museum.

O'Hara is known throughout the theatre world for his career as a playwright and director.

In 2011 he became a company member at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington, D.C.

In 2013 O'Hara was one of 14 people awarded a playwright residency grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and was Woolly Mammoth's playwright in residence from 2013-2015.

In the mid-nineties, O'Hara wrote the script to a Richard Pryor biopic called Live that was to be directed by Martin Scorsese. However, the project remained trapped in development and has yet to be made.

...
Wikipedia