Leslie Lee

Playwright Leslie Lee is Executive Director of the NEC and a founding artist of La MaMa e.t.c. His plays have been produced both on and off Broadway, and he has also written for film and television.

His acclaimed play, The First Breeze of Summer, starring Leslie Uggams, enjoyed a successful revival in 2008 with the Signature Theatre Company. The First Breeze of Summer, originally produced by the Negro Ensemble Company, went on to win an Obie Award for Best New American Play and the Outer Critics Circle Award. Subsequently, the play moved to the Palace Theatre on Broadway, where it received a Tony Award nomination for Best Play. Lee was the 2008 Audelco Playwright Award Winner and has been nominated for eleven Audelco Awards. Many of his plays have been produced by the Negro Ensemble Company, the Black Rep in St. Louis and Crossroads Theatre Company in New Jersey. Mr. Lee has taught playwriting and screenwriting at NYU and Rutgers University.Mr. Lee's plays include The War Party, Colored People's Time, Blues in a Broken Tongue, The Rabbit's Foot, Black Eagles, Elegy to a Down Queen, Cops and Robbers, Hannah Davis, and the musicals Golden Boy, with Charles Strouse and Lee Adams; Martin, with Charles Strouse; and Phillis with Micki Grant.

Mr. Lee's extensive television and film work includes The Vernon Johns Story, with James Earl Jones and Mary Alice; Two Mothers, Two Sons; The Killing Floor, with Alfre Woodard and Moses Gunn; and adaptations of Richard Wright's short story, Almos' A Man, with LeVar Burton, and his own award-winning play, The First Breeze of Summer. His documentary work includes Langston Hughes, the Dreamkeeper; The Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment; Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey; and Culture Shock: Huckleberry Finn. Mr. Lee's many awards include an Obie, the Outer Circle Critics Award, the Arthur Miller Playwriting Award, the Audelco Best Play Award, the Isabelle Strickland Award for Excellence in the Field of the Arts, the Joe A Callahan Award, and a Tony Nomination. He currently teaches playwriting and screenwriting in the Rita and Burton Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing Program, Tisch School of the Arts at NYU.