Sharon Bridgforth

Sharon Bridgforth (born May 15, 1958, in Chicago, Illinois) is an American writer working in theater. == Early life == Bridgforth was born in Cook County Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, and moved to South Central Los Angeles when she was 3 years old. She discovered the diversity of the city during her long bus commutes to school. == Career == From 1993 to 1998, Bridgforth worked as the founder, writer, and artistic director of the root wy'mn theatre company. root wy'mn's touring roster included: the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, The Theater Offensive in Boston, La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, California, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. From 2002 to 2009, she served as the anchor artist for the Austin Project, produced by Omi Osun Joni L. Jones and the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, University of Texas at Austin. Her work, "Finding Voice Facilitation Method" was published in Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project edited by Osun Joni L. Jones, Lisa L. Moore, and herself. In 2008, Bridgforth received a National Performance Network Creation Fund award, for delta dandi, co-commissioned by Women & Their Work, in partnership with the National Performance Network. Freedom Train Productions in New York presented a reading of the work in 2008. A workshop production of the work was produced in 2009 at the Long Center in Austin, Texas. At Northwestern University, as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation artist-in-residence in the performance studies department, Bridgforth presented a workshop production of delta dandi during the 2009 Solo/Black/Woman performance series. Since 2009, Bridgforth has been resident playwright at New Dramatists, New York. Her work blood pudding, was presented in the 2010 New York Summerstage festival. She was the 2010–2012 Visiting Multicultural Faculty member at the Theatre School at DePaul University and is the curator of the Theatrical Jazz Institute at Links Hall, produced by the school, Links Hall and herself. In 2022, Bridgforth was featured in the book 50 Key Figures in Queer US Theatre, with a profile written by theatre scholar T. Chester. === the bull-jean stories === Published by RedBone Press, the bull-jean stories give cultural documentation and social commentary on African-American herstory and survival. Set in the rural South of the 1920s through the 1940s, the bull-jean stories uses traditional storytelling and nontraditional verse to chronicle the course of love returning in the lifetimes of one woman-loving-woman named bull-dog-jean. === Love Conjure/Blues === Both a performance and a novel, Love Conjure/Blues places the fiction-form inside a traditional Black American voice, inviting dramatic interpretation and movement within a highly literary text: It is filled with folktales, poetry, haints, prophecy, song, and oral history. Love Conjure/Blues was also published by RedBone Press. === dat Black Mermaid Man Lady === Exists a