Cheryl Black

Cheryl Black is Professor of Theatre and Catherine Paine Middlebush Chair of Fine and Performing Arts at the University of Missouri, an actress (member of Actors Equity Association and the Screen Actors Guild), playwright, director and dramaturge. Black is the author of The Women of Provincetown, 1915-1922 (University of Alabama Press, 2002), co-editor of Experiments in Democracy: Interracial and Cross Cultural Exchange in American Theatre, 1915-1945 (SIU Press, 2016), co-editor of Modern American Drama: the 1990s (Bloomsbury Press, 2017) and has published essays on women's theatre and feminist theatre in Staging a Cultural Paradigm: the Political and the Personal in American Drama (edited by Barbara Ozieblo & Miriam Lopez-Rodriguez), Feminist Revisions of Classic Texts (edited by Sharon Friedman), The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Theatre Survey, Slavic and East European Performance, Theatre History Studies, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Theatre Studies, Theatre Annual, the African American National Biography (edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.), Notable American Women (edited by Susan Ware), and Facts on Files' Companion to American Drama (edited by Jackson Bryer).

She has received research grants from the University of Missouri Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the New York Public Library. She is the recipient of an MU Kemper Fellowship for Excellence in Teaching and Outstanding Teacher in Higher Education Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Black is a Fellow of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre and serves on the executive boards of the American Theatre and Drama Society, the Susan Glaspell Society, and the College of Fellows. Recent dramatic adaptations include an audio drama, William Wells Brown’s Leap for Freedom (co-author Renee Pringle, with assistance from mentor Sue Zizza) for the National Audio Theatre Festival, Dracula (with LR Hults), Much Ado About Nothing (with Patricia Downey), The School for Scandal, She Stoops to Conquer, As You Like It (with Adrianne Adderley), Susan Glaspell's Chains of Dew and Fugitive's Return, and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.