Danai Gurira

2012 Winner in
Drama

Danai Gurira is an award-winning playwright and actress. Her plays include Eclipsed, which premiered at The Public Theater before moving to Broadway in 2015; Familiar (Yale Repertory Theatre and Playwrights Horizons); The Convert (McCarter Theater, Goodman Theatre, and CTG’s Kirk Douglas Theatre), which won the Stavis Award, an LA Drama Critics Award and six Ovation Awards; and In Continuum (Primary Stages), co-written and co-performed Nikkole Salter, and for which Gurira won a Helen Hayes Award for Best Lead Actress. As an actress, Danai stars as “Michonne” in AMC’s critically-acclaimed original series The Walking Dead. Danai’s film acting credits include Mother of George, The Visitor, 3 Backyards, Restless City, and Black Panther. Danai was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and is the recipient of a 2012 Whiting Award in Drama. She is the co-founder and President of Almasi, a Zimbabwean American Dramatic Arts Collaborative Organization. Danai was born in the US and raised in Zimbabwe by Zimbabwean parents. She holds an MFA from Tisch School of the Arts, NYU.

Photo Credit:
Gage Skidmore
Reviews & Praise

“[The Convert is] intense, harrowing and flatteringly demanding. Gurira refuses to condescend to her audience, either in her storytelling—entire scenes are performed in the Shona dialect—or in her moral position, offering no clear-cut villains or heroes.” —Los Angeles Times

"A surprisingly vivacious portrait of helplessness, of the entirely human impulse to adapt . . . conveyed with a lovely authority, at times even a whimsicality. [In this] authentic-feeling production, [Danai Gurira's] tight-knit kinship with these characters comes across as if she shared the stage with them." —The Washington Post [on Eclipsed]

“ . . . a kaleidoscopic portrait of two black women—one a middle-class wife and mother in Zimbabwe, the other a 19-year-old at loose ends in Los Angeles—whose lives are suddenly upended by H.I.V. diagnoses. Moving, spirited and surprisingly funny, the play is anything but bleak, as its subject matter might seem to imply . . . In the Continuum humanizes the painful stories it has to tell with such emotional vibrancy that the play leaves behind a warm afterglow, of human struggles explored, illumined and embraced.” —Charles Isherwood, The New York Times

Selected Works

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Outside Links
IMDB Page
Video Interview (Tavis Smiley)
Giving Voice to the Voiceless (Vanity Fair)