Lydia R. Diamond

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Lydia R. Diamond is a nationally recognized playwright and an assistant professor at Boston University’s School of Theatre. Her award-winning plays—including Harriet Jacobs, The Bluest Eye, and Voyeurs de Venus—have been produced across the country. Most recently, Diamond’s play Stick Fly was produced on Broadway at the Cort Theatre, where it enjoyed a three-month run.

Diamond will use her fellowship to finish a work in progress currently titled Smart People, about a neurobiologist who studies race through brain imaging. She will also research and complete a first draft of a new play, Victoria’s Sarah, a historical fiction based on the life of a West African princess raised in Queen Victoria’s court in the early 1800s.

Diamond’s work has won the African American Arts Alliance of Chicago Black Excellence Award, an American Alliance for Theatre and Education Award, a Back Stage Garland Award, a Black Theatre Alliance's Negro Ensemble Company Award for Best Play and Lorraine Hansberry Award for Best Writing, an Independent Reviewers of New England (IRNE) Award, an LA Weekly Theater Award, and a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award. She received an Illinois Arts Council Grant and has been in residence at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago through the NEA/TCG Theatre Residency Program for Playwrights. Diamond has been a W.E.B. DuBois Institute Fellow and a Huntington Playwrighting Fellow and is currently a member of the Theatre Communications Group board and the Huntington Theatre Company’s Council of Overseers. She graduated from Northwestern University.