Wissenswertes

Stage director, playwright and educator.

She has taught at seven universities which include serving as Professor of Theatre and Black Studies at Lehman College of the City University of New York (CUNY).

To date she has directed over 100 plays. For her efforts she has earned four Audelco Awards, two Ceba Awards, The Lloyd Richards Award for Directing at the North Carolina Black Theatre Festival, Distinguished Howard Player and Alumni Awards, a Lehman Scholar Achievement Award, and The Black Rose of Excellence from Encore Magazine.

She also attended The Art Institute of Chicago and was a Fulbright Fellow to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London.

She is a graduate of Howard University (Class of 1950) in Washington, DC, USA with a major in drama.

After actress/director Vinnette Carroll, Perry became the first major Black woman director in the New York Theatre community of the 1960s.

"Black Beauties: 100 Years of African Women on Broadway," a benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, was written by her and presented at the Lamb's Theatre in New York City. (März 2003)

Her father Graham T. Perry was an assistant attorney general for the State of Illinois from 1942 to 1950. Her mother the former Pearl Gant was one of the first African American court reporters in Chicago.

Survived by her three daughters, Lorraine Ryder, Gail Perry-Ryder Tigere, and Natalie Ryder Redcross, and four grandchildren.

Perry also wrote "Sounds of the City", a 15-minute daily soap opera that aired on the Mutual Black Network in the mid-1970s.

In 1954-1955 she was a Fulbright Scholar in London, studying classical theatre at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art before quickly transferring to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art after she and other foreign students experienced racial harassment.

She received national exposure as the second-place winner in the 1958 Picturama Contest, an essay competition sponsored by Ebony Magazine.

In 1949, she was one of the twenty-one Howard Players and three faculty who toured Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany that fall with fifty-nine alternating performances of Mamba's Daughters, the stage adaptation by Dorothy Heyward and DuBose Heyward of DuBose Heyward's book, and Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck. They were seen off on the SS Stavangerfjord (1918) by Howard University Trustee Eleanor Roosevelt. The tour was a great success. On the opening night in Denmark of "Mamba's Daughters", they received fifteen curtain calls.

In 1950, she received a BA in drama from Howard. She continued her studies at the Goodman School of Drama at the Art Institute of Chicago (now at DePaul University) (1950-1952), where she received an MFA in directing in 1952 with a production and thesis of the play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller.

She was one of the first African-American women to direct off-Broadway.

Cousin of Mamie Hansberry, Nantille Hansberry Tubbs, and Taye Hansberry.