Carlyle Brown papers

Carlyle Brown (May 6, 1945-) a Charleston, South Carolina native, who was raised in New York City, is an award-winning playwright/performer, curator and artistic director of Carlyle Brown and Company based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is also the Founding Director of the Laughing Mirror Theatre, an experimental ensemble company devoted to the research and development of Black American theatrical forms in New York.

His various plays have been produced at theatres across the country and internationally. His early works include The Little Tommy Parker Celebrated Colored Minstrel Show produced Off-Broadway by The Negro Ensemble Company. Followed by The African Company Presents Richard III for the Penumbra Theatre Company. With the Penumbra premier of Buffalo Hair in 1994, and a National McKnight Fellowship, Brown moved to the Twin Cities which is his artistic home.

Brown is an alumnus of New Dramatists and a Lifetime Core Writer at the Playwrights' Center. He has received numerous commissions, fellowships and awards including the 2006 Black Theatre Network's Winona Lee Fletcher Award for outstanding achievement and artistic excellence, a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2010 Otto Rene Castillo Awards for Distinguished Achievement in the American Theater, and a 2019 Helen Merrill Award recipient. Brown's expansive theatre productions include The Beggar's Strike at the Children's Theater Company; the Mixed Blood production of Pure Confidence , which moved to Off-Broadway in New York. His plays include The Negro of Peter the Great, A Big Blue Nail, Dartmoor Prison, Yellow Moon Rising, among others. He is also a poet and screenwriter ("The Epitaph"), and he performed his own one-man play, "Sea Never Dry," at the South Street Seaport Museum, in New York City.

"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 a curator of the Cultural Diaspora Playwrights' Festival presented in partnership with The Playwrights' Center in July 2019. 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. Brown is a trustee of the Camargo Foundation and is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Playwright-in-Residence at Illusion Theater in Minneapolis. Additionally, Brown is a recipient of the 2022 Legacy Award from the Legacy Playwright's Initiative of the Dramatist's Guild Foundation." (From www.carlylebrownandcompany.org)

Prior to his career in the theater, Brown was a specialist in outdoor adventure education working with organizations including Outward Bound, as a maritime educator. Brown was also a Chief Mate and licensed Captain of sailing vessels specializing in 19th century schooners in the North Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea, and the Baltic Sea, for nearly twenty years.