FACULTY & STAFF
Andrea Hairston
Louise Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor of Theatre
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Andrea Hairston is the Louise Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor of Theatre at Smith College where she directs, teaches playwriting, and African, African American and Caribbean theatre literature. A playwright, director, actor, and musician, she is the Artistic Director of Chrysalis Theatre and has produced original theatre with music, dance, and masks for more than 25 years. Her plays have been produced at Yale Rep, Rites and Reason, the Kennedy Center, StageWest, and on Public Radio & Public Television. She has also translated plays by Michael Ende and Kaca Celan from German to English.
Hairston has received many playwriting and directing awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Grant to Playwrights, a Rockerfeller/NEA Grant for New Works, an NEA grant to work as dramaturge/director with playwright Pearl Cleage, a Ford Foundation Grant to collaborate with Senegalese Master Drummer Massamba Diop, and Shubert Fellowship for Playwriting.
Since 1997, her plays produced by Chysalis Theatre, Soul Repairs, Lonely Stardust and Hummingbird Flying Backward, have been science fiction plays. Archangels of Funk, a SF theatre jam, garnered her a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship for 2003.
Her speculative novel, Mindscape, excerpted in Dark Matter: Reading The Bones, an anthology of African diasporic speculative fiction edited by Sheree R. Thomas and published by Warner Books in 2004, was published in March, 2006 by Aquedect Press. Griots of the Galaxy, a short story, appears in So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Visions of the Future, an anthology edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan and published in August 2004 by arsenal Pulp Press. An essay, "Octavia Butler-Praise Song to Prophetic Artist," is included in Daughters of Earth, edited by Justine Larbalestier and published by Wesleyan Press in May of 2006.
She is currently working on a new novel, Exploding in Slow Motion, for which she received the 2004 Speculative Literature Foundation's Older Writer Grant.
