Eisa
Davis
is an award-winning actor, writer, and singer-songwriter working on stage and
screen. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for her play Bulrusher,
and wrote and starred in Angela’s Mixtape, named a best of the year by The
New Yorker. Other plays include Ramp (Ruby Prize winner), The History of Light (Barrymore
nomination), Paper Armor, Umkovu, Six Minutes, Warriors Don’t Cry, Mushroom,
and ||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :||. Collaborations include Maze
at The Shed, The House on Coco Road, Active Ingredients, Hip
Hop Anansi, and Cirque du Soleil’s first ice show, Crystal. Works
in progress include a sound art installation/performance piece entitled The Essentialisn’t, and a
musical version of Devil In A Blue Dress. Eisa wrote for both seasons
of the Netflix series She’s Gotta Have It, and is creating a limited series
based on the memoir by Carlotta Walls LaNier, the youngest member of the Little
Rock Nine. Eisa is a 2020 Creative Capital recipient. She was awarded the
prestigious Herb Alpert Award in Theatre, and was a resident playwright at New
Dramatists, where she won the Helen Merrill Award and the Whitfield Cook Award,
among others. She has received fellowships from Sundance, Yaddo, the MacDowell
Colony, Cave Canem, and the Doris Duke, Van Lier and Mellon Foundations. As an
actor, she is an Obie Award winner for Sustained Excellence in Performance.
Eisa’s recent work includes a microplay by Lynn Nottage in the virtual series
Theatre For One, the role of June in the musical adaptation of The Secret
Life of Bees (AUDELCO award, Lortel nomination), Kings at the Public
(Drama League nomination), the 2017 Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius
Caesar, and Preludes created by Dave Malloy and Rachel Chavkin, for
which she received her second Lucille Lortel nomination. Other theatre
performances include Antigone in Ferguson, Luck of the Irish (Lucille Lortel and AUDELCO
nominations), the world premieres of This and The Call, the
first revival of The
Piano Lesson at Yale Rep (also composer and music director), and the
acclaimed Broadway rock musical Passing Strange, captured on film by
Spike Lee. Current television work includes Betty, Bluff City Law, God
Friended Me, Rise, Condi Rice on The Looming Tower, and Succession.
