
Birthplace: Germany
Aleshea Harris is an acclaimed Black playwright whose work has been staged on multiple continents, and who made her first movie as director/writer of her Obie-winning 2018 play, Is God Is (2026), starring Kara Young, Mallori Johnson, Sterling K. Brown, Vivica A. Fox, Janelle Monae, Erika Alexander and Mykelti Williamson, produced by Orion Pictures/Viva Maude/Linden Entertainment and released in wide theatrical pattern by Amazon MGM Studios.
Aleshea Harris was born in Germany and raised as a U.S. Army child in Germany and in the U.S., including Mississippi, by her parents, including her Trinidad-born mother. Harris earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Theater from the University of Southern Mississippi and then earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California.
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First Theater: Aleshea Harris was born as an “Army brat” in Germany, and recalls that her first memories of a stage play were a children’s theater performance in Germany.
From Acting to Writing: Harris has noted in an interview that she began in theater as an actor, “but I remember thinking that I wanted to have a little more control over how I, as a Black woman, could exist inside of a narrative. I set out to write, to make the stories that I wanted to see. I wasn’t really experiencing the roles I was given with my sense of humor, and my sensibility in the world, and I felt that I might as well try and create the stories I wanted to see.”
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