Jeremy O. Harris

Jeremy O. Harris (born c. 1989) is an American playwright, actor, and philanthropist, known for his plays "Daddy" and Slave Play. The latter received 12 nominations at the 74th Tony Awards, breaking the record previously set by the 2018 revival of Angels in America for most nominations for a non-musical play. Harris was the winner of the 2018 Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, given by the Vineyard Theatre in New York City. A profile in the New York Times said that Harris's "ability to render subconscious trauma into provocative theatrical expression, as potentially unsettling as entertaining, has earned him a lot of attention in a very short time." Out called him "the queer black savior the theater world needs." Harris grew up in a military family, moving often before settling in Martinsville, Virginia. He has since lived in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. He attended the Carlisle School in Martinsville, Virginia. Harris studied toward a Bachelor of Fine Arts in acting from The Theatre School at DePaul University in 2009 but was cut from the program after a year. In 2019, he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama. Harris landed a role in the play Jon at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. He worked as an actor in Chicago, then moved to Los Angeles to further his career. There he began a collaboration with musician Isabella Summers that resulted in the play Xander Xyst, Dragon 1; the play was produced at ANT Fest 2017 in New York. He had a residency at the MacDowell Colony, where he wrote the play "Daddy", in which a young black artist (Franklin) becomes involved with an older European art collector (Andre). "Daddy" served as Harris's writing sample when he applied to the Yale School of Drama, where he began studies in the fall of 2016.