Carlyle Brown is a playwright/performer, curator and artistic director of Carlyle Brown & Company based in Minneapolis. His plays have been produced at theatres across the country and internationally. He is an alumnus of New Dramatists and a Lifetime Core Writer at the Playwrights’ Center. He has received numerous commissions, fellowships and awards including 2006 Black Theatre Network’s Winona Lee Fletcher Award for outstanding achievement and artistic excellence, a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2010 Otto Rene Castillo Award for Political Theatre, a 2010 United States Artist Fellowship, a 2018 William Inge Award for Distinguished Achievement in the American Theater, and a 2019 Hellen Merrill Award recipient. A scholar and historian, Brown has been an artist in residence or visiting professor at several colleges and universities and has worked as a museum exhibit writer and story consultant. He is curator of the Cultural Diaspora Playwrights Residency at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France and The Afro-Atlantic Playwrights’ Festival presented in partnership with The Playwrights’ Center in July 2019, and again in the Fall of 2023 in partnership with The Playwrights’ Center and Illusion Theater. His solo shows include The Fula from America: An African Journey, Therapy and Resistance, The History of Religion and Acting Black: Demystifying Racism, created to inspire open and honest conversations about race and diversity. He is a trustee of The Camargo Foundation and is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Playwright-in-Residence at Illusion Theater in Minneapolis. Mr. Brown is a recipient of the 2022 Legacy Award from the Legacy Playwright’s Initiative of the Dramatist’s Guild Foundation.
