LPTW Lucille Lortel Award 2024
THIS YEAR WE HONOR
Celeste Bedford Walker
Celeste Bedford Walker’s award-winning canon includes over forty plays, videos, documentaries, and films that have been performed and viewed in major venues across the country. She has received numerous commissions to write dramas, comedies, and musicals for theaters, schools, museums, and organizations.
Recognized by the U.S. Congress for her historical contribution as producer and author of works that bring to light lost stories of African American history, Walker has received several honors and awards in theatre.
Awards include the 2023 Guggenheim Fellows; finalist in the international Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for outstanding work by a female playwright; the Beverly Hills/Hollywood NAACP Theatre Awards for Best Playwright and Best Play for positive portrayal of Blacks in the media; the National Black Theatre's August Wilson Playwriting Award for significant contributions to Black and American Theatre; finalist in 38th Annual Samuel French OOB Short Play Festival; the Houston Ensemble Theatre's Salute to Texas Playwrights; New York's AUDELCO nominations and awards; the Memphis Tennessee's Gyneka Award, and others.
Celeste was commissioned to write a play as part of the BOLD Theater Women's Leadership Circle grant under the leadership of Ensemble Theatre's artistic director Eileen Morris. Her historical drama, "The Red Blood of War," was selected to participate in the 39th Annual Wm. Inge Theatre Festival New Play Lab in Independence, Kansas. But due to COVID-19, it was postponed to spring 2021.
Walker's work is also featured in the anthology "Acting Up and Getting Down," published by the University of Texas Press, and "Sassy Mamas and Other Plays," published by Texas A&M University Press.
A proud member of the Dramatists Guild of America, Mrs. Walker is also a council member of the Texas Institute of Letters, a distinguished honor society founded in 1936 to celebrate Texas literature and recognize distinctive literary achievements. Plus, Celeste is a member of Honor Roll!, an advocacy and action group of playwrights over forty and their allies whose goal is their inclusion in the theater.
Her plays, universal in theme, come out of the Black experience, embracing the sacred and the mundane, the serious and the comic, with an awesome delight in the wisdom and the witlessness of the human condition.
For more information and to RSVP visit the LPTW Lucille Lortel Award page here
