1. Katori Hall was born on May 10,1981 and is an American playwright and screenwriter from Memphis, Tennessee.
22 Facts About Katori Hall
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Katori Hall's parents moved the family from Raleigh, North Carolina, to a predominantly white neighborhood in Memphis, Tennessee, when she was five years old.
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Katori Hall graduated from Craigmont High School as the first Black valedictorian in the school's history, and received her bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 2003 with a major in African-American Studies and Creative Writing.
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Katori Hall was initially a student in the theater department, where she took classes with fellow student Kelly McCreary.
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Katori Hall was awarded top departmental honors from the university's Institute for Research in African-American Studies.
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Katori Hall graduated from the Juilliard School's Lila Acheson Wallace playwriting program in 2009.
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Katori Hall gained mainstream prominence after her play The Mountaintop, about Martin Luther King Jr.
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Katori Hall took the play to London after she was unable to secure a venue in the United States.
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Katori Hall's play Hurt Village, a drama about life and change in a Memphis housing project, premiered in 2012 off-Broadway at Signature Theatre Company as part of the theatre's inaugural season.
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In 2014 it was announced that Katori Hall will make her feature film directorial debut with an adaptation of Hurt Village.
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In Our Lady of Kibeho, Katori Hall tells the story of a real-life incident of 1981, when a group of Rwandan schoolgirls claimed to see a vision of the Virgin Mary.
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Katori Hall wrote the book for the musical Tina: The Tina Turner Musical alongside Frank Ketelaar and Kees Prins.
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Katori Hall received a nomination for the 2020 Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical for the show.
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Katori Hall developed her play Pussy Valley into the television drama series on Starz, renamed P-Valley, which premiered in 2020.
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Katori Hall serves as the series creator, showrunner, and executive producer.
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Katori Hall is married to Alan Tumusiime, a video editor and photographer.
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Katori Hall's awards include a Laurence Olivier Award Susan Smith Blackburn Award, Lark Play Development Center Playwrights of New York Fellowship, Kate Neal Kinley Fellowship, two Lecompte du Nouy Prizes from Lincoln Center, Fellowship of Southern Writers Bryan Family Award in Drama, Fellowship, and the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award.
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Katori Hall was shortlisted for the London Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright Award and received the Otis Guernsey New Voices Playwriting Award from the William Inge Theatre Festival.
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Katori Hall is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
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Katori Hall was awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play The Hot Wing King.
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Katori Hall has been a book reviewer, journalist, and essayist for publications such as The Boston Globe, Essence, Newsweek and The New York Times.
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Katori Hall has been a Kennedy Center Playwriting Fellow at the O'Neill.