Joshua Williams

In 2007, New York Magazine named Williams "a star of tomorrow" on the basis of his forthcoming novel, Live To Tell Me So. His plays have been produced at Theatre Intime, Princeton University, the Capital Fringe Festival and UC Berkeley. He was a 2012-2013 member of the PlayGround San Francisco Writing Pool and had two of his short plays read at Berkeley Repertory Theater. In 2011, he directed the North American premiere of Tanzanian dramatist Ebrahim Hussein's Kinjeketile at UC Berkeley. Williams is also translating the complete plays of Ebrahim Hussein from Swahili into English for Oxford University Press.

Race was on display at the 1901 World Pan American Exposition at Buffalo, New York. In exhibits like “Darkest Africa”, “Old Plantation”, and “The American Negro Exhibit”, concessionaires presented unique, and often conflicting, visions of blackness in America at the turn of the twentieth century. These exhibits left behind a fragmented archive of descriptions, newspaper articles, photographs, and film clips that sheds new light on a critical moment in the construction of modern black and American identity. At Buffalo, a landmark new musical, brings this archive to life—performing it virtually verbatim, making present an experience of the past when definitions of race were literally written, directed, choreographed, and performed in order to reconstruct the American character in the wake of national crisis. During their residency, the Creative Team will conduct site-specific rehearsals and concert readings of a new musical in development about race and the 1901 Pan-American Exposition entitled At Buffalo.