Eisa Davis
Eisa Davis was the 2012 Herb Alpert Award winner in Theatre and a 2013 Obie Award winner for Sustained Excellence in Performance. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for her play Bulrusher, and wrote and starred in Angela’s Mixtape, named a best of 2009 by The New Yorker. Other plays includeRamp (Ruby Prize winner), The History of Light (Barrymore nomination), Paper Armor, Umkovu, Six Minutes, Warriors Don’t Cry,and the collaborations Active Ingredients and Hip Hop Anansi. She contributed a storyline to the collaborative marketplace event Trade Practices and an episode to The Mysteries at the Flea, and is currently writing the musicals Flowers Are Sleeping and Devil in a Blue Dress. Eisa was a resident playwright at New Dramatists, where she won the Helen Merrill Award, and the Whitfield Cook Award, among others. She has received fellowships from Sundance/UCross, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Cave Canem, and the Doris Duke, Van Lier and Mellon Foundations. As an actor, she is currently appearing in Preludes by Dave Malloy, directed by Rachel Chavkin. Recent theatre work includes The Cradle Will Rock, Luck of the Irish (Lucille Lortel and AUDELCO nominations), the world premieres of The Call andThis, the first revival of The Piano Lesson at Yale Rep (also composer and music director), and her Obie Award-winning performance in the Broadway rock musical Passing Strange, captured on film by Spike Lee. Eisa plays Cynthia Driscoll on House of Cards, was Bubbles’ sister on The Wire, has guest starred on Gotham, The Blacklist, The Good Wife, Damages and Soul Food, and recurred on Smash and Hart of Dixie. Film work includes Free Angela, Welcometo the Rileys (opposite James Gandolfini),Robot Stories, The Architect, Confess, Happenstance, Pretty Bird, Apparition of the Eternal Church, Brass Tacks, In The Family, The Letter,and The Volunteer (Best Narrative Feature, Urbanworld). Eisa is a member of the Actors Studio, a Usual Suspect at New York Theater Workshop, and was an artist-in-residence at Symphony Space. A graduate of Harvard, she was the 2013/14 Arthur Levitt Fellow at Williams College.
