Eisa Davis & Jillian Walker: Two Conversations

About Eisa DavisJillian Walker

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 Angelas 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 Dont 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 Soleils first ice show Crystal. Works in progress include a sound art installation/performance piece entitled The Essentialisnt and a musical version of Devil In A Blue Dress. Eisa wrote for both seasons of the Netflix series Shes 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. Eisas 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.Jillian Walker is a multidimensional artist teacher and ancestral guide. She is the creator of the critically-acclaimed SKiNFoLK: An American Show (NY Times Critics Pick Kilroys List) forthcoming from 53rd State Press Songs of Speculation (2020 Third Coast Award) Sarahs Salt and the upcoming film BLK GRK (or hiding in plain sight). Jillian is a 2020 Lilly Award recipient and seeks to inspire the culture ever-more toward love and liberation in her time-bending in(ter)dependent publication The Free List. Jillian currently lives works and heals in New York. www.thisisjillianwalker.com