Jeremy O. Harris

For the 74th Tony Awards, Slave Play was nominated for a historic total of 12 awards.

Jeremy O. Harris (born June 2, 1989) is an American playwright, actor, and philanthropist.

Harris studied toward a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in acting from The Theatre School at DePaul University in 2009, but was cut from the program after a year.

"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.

While still at Yale, Harris wrote Slave Play.

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).

It was produced at Yale in October 2017, and won the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award and the Rosa Parks Playwriting Award at the 2018 American College Theater Festival.

Harris gained prominence for his 2018 Slave Play, which received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Play.

Harris is also known for his work in film and television.

He produced and co-wrote the A24 film Zola (2021), for which he received a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay.

He acted in the HBO Max series Gossip Girl (2021), the Netflix series Emily in Paris (2022), and in the film The Sweet East (2023).

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 City.

He attended the Carlisle School in Martinsville, Virginia.

It was then produced off-Broadway at the New York Theatre Workshop under the direction of Robert O'Hara in 2018, Harris's first professional production as playwright.

The play addresses sexuality and racial trauma in America.

It begins with interracial sexual violence on a slave plantation in the American South and continues in present-day America at a sex therapy retreat for interracial couples.

The couples include black participants who are no longer able to receive pleasure from their white partners.

The white partners have a blind-spot about the role that race plays in their relationships.

Critic Jesse Green summarized the play's message by saying "that one race lives with history each day while another pretends not to".

Though critically acclaimed, the play drew ire from those who found the play's content disrespectful of African-American history.

This broke 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".

In 2018, Harris was awarded the Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, which includes a residency at the off-Broadway Vineyard Theatre.

In 2019, he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree 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.

In 2019, The New Group and the Vineyard Theatre co-produced a revised version of Harris's earlier play "Daddy".

starring Alan Cumming.

Reviewer Christian Lewis called the play "a bold, experimental, political, and important work of theater that will not soon be forgotten".

New York Times reviewer Ben Brantley noted some excellent performances, but found the dialogue "endless and circular and repetitive" and the play too "cerebral".

In November 2019, an experimental work entitled Black Exhibition, credited under the pseudonym @GaryXXXFisher, debuted at the Brooklyn theater Bushwick Starr.

Using Ntozake Shange's term choreopoem to describe its structure, Harris combines language and movement in a work that centers on five characters: San Francisco writer Gary Fisher, Kathy Acker, Yukio Mishima, Samuel R. Delany, and Missouri college athlete Michael L. Johnson.

In early 2020, Harris signed a deal with HBO, and is developing a pilot as well as becoming a co-producer for season 2 of Euphoria, after consulting on the first season.

More recently, he set $50,000 commissions for new stage work.

Harris published a condensed version of his play Yell: A Documentary of My Time Here in n+1 magazine's Fall 2020 issue.

Harris describes the full play as "a site-specific document of [his] time in the space of Yale School of Drama".