Soyica Colbert
Interim Provost Professor of African American Studies and Performing Arts
Soyica Diggs Colbert is the Idol Family Professor of Black Studies and Performing Arts at Georgetown University.
Colbert is a winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the author of several books, including award-winning Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. The book is described as a “loving, lavishly detailed” (New York Times) and captivating portrait of Lorraine Hansberry’s life, art, and political activism—one of O Magazine‘s best books of April 2021. According to Dave Itzkoff, in The New York Times Book Review, Radical Vision is “A devoted and deeply felt account of the development of an artist’s mind.” In this acclaimed biography of Lorraine Hansberry, Colbert narrates a life at the intersection of art and politics, arguing that for Hansberry the theater operated as a rehearsal room for her political and intellectual work.
She has also held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support a residency at the Schomburg Center, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Stanford University, Mellon Foundation, and the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University.
Colbert’s writing has been featured in the The New York Times , Washington Post , Public Books , Metrograph and American Theatre . She has been interviewed on NPR and commented for the New York Times , USA Today , CNN, and the Washington Post .
Colbert has lectured nationally and internationally at universities, high schools, and middle schools as well as for civic and arts organizations. She is an Associate Director at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C.
In addition to Radical Vision, Colbert is the author of Bodies: Theory for Theatre Studies, Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics, and The African American Theatrical Body. Colbert co-edited Race and Performance After Repetition and The Psychic Hold of Slavery. Most recently, she served as a Creative Content Producer for The Public Theatre’s audio play, shadow/land , and a curator for the exhibition “Art is Energy”: Lorraine Hansberry, World Builder at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).
Her research interests span the 19th-21st centuries, from Harriet Tubman to Beyoncé, and from poetics to performance.