ARTIST BIOS

E. Patrick Johnson (Writer) is Dean of the School of Communication and Annenberg University Professor at Northwestern University. A member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Johnson’s work has greatly impacted African American Studies, Performance Studies, and Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He is the author of several books, including Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (2003); Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History (2008); Black. Queer. Southern. Women.—An Oral History (2018); Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women (2019), in addition to a number of edited and co-edited collections, essays, and plays.

Jamar Jones (Actor) With roots stemming from both Carolinas, and raised in Virginia, Jamar Jones is a multi-hyphenate creative molded with a Southern sensibility. Formerly a Resident Company Member of PlayMakers Repertory Company, regional PRC credits include Fat Ham, Much Ado about Nothing, Emma, The Legend of Georgia McBride, Hamlet, Seattle Rep’s Blues for an Alabama Sky, Woolly Mammoth’s Akira Kurosawa Explains His Movies and Yogurt…, and most recently The Inheritance at Round House Theatre. As a museum theater practitioner, Jamar has collaborated with museums and history-forward institutions, including the International Spy Museum, Museum of the American Revolution, Colonial Williamsburg, Mount Vernon, and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, to research, excavate, and share stories from centuries ago, particularly those centering Black American life. This work has even expanded to international collaborations (200 Years of Returns) in Monrovia, Liberia. 2019 Richmond Theatre Critics Circle Award- Best Actor in a Play for An Octoroon (TheatreLab). 2022 RTCC Award- Best Lead Performance- Play for Fires in the Mirror (Firehouse Theatre). Television: Law & Order (NBC). UNC at Chapel Hill- M.F.A (Acting). The College of William and Mary-BA. jamarjonesofficial.com

Joseph Megel (Director) Award-winning director Joseph Megel directed the premier of Howard L. Craft’s Freight: The Five Incarnations of Abel Green in North Carolina, Off-Off Broadway, Off Broadway, and at the Fountain Theater in LA. A filming of his Los Angeles production will be streaming on Starz starting in February 2026, video direction by and starring J. Alphonse Nicholson.  At UNC, he is artist in residence in Performance Studies and director of the Process Series: New Works in Development, continuously presenting public readings of new works since 2008. A graduate of Northwestern University, School of Speech, he holds an M.F.A. from the University of Southern California, Peter Stark Motion Picture Producing Program, School of Cinema. Among his most memorable directing experiences is working with E. Patrick Johnson on his one-person dramatic adaptation of Sweet Tea in Durham, Evanston and Los Angeles. Favorite directorial credits include: Kane Smego’s Temples of Lung and Air at Detroit Public Theatre and PlayMakers Theater; Guillermo Reyes’s Men on the Verge of Hispanic Breakdown in its Off-Broadway production (Outer Critics Circle Award) and in Los Angeles (Best Director Ovation Award nomination, Best Production Award winner); Jennifer Maisel’s The Last Seder at EST West in Los Angeles,Washington, D.C., and Chicago; Derek Goldman’s adaptation of Studs Terkel’s Will The Circle Be Unbroken in Chapel Hill and Washington D.C. (featuring David Strathairn, Theodore Bikel, Keith Randolph Smith, and Kathleen Chalfant).  He was the original director of D.W.  Gregory’s Radium Girls 25 years ago, and will be directing the premiere workshop of a new musical version in March 2026 at Seven Angels Theatre in Waterbury, CT.