Laurie Carlos is a seminal American theatre artist. An original player in the New York Avant-Garde Performance scene, Laurie has developed new characters and new aesthetics for the stage for over thirty years. She is a gifted writer, whose oft-anthologized pieces, including White Chocolate, The Cooking Show and Organdy Falsetto represent daring and successful forays into abstract aesthetics within late-twentieth century American Theatre.

Laurie Carlos - a dynamic, OBIE Award-winning actress, who created the role of Lady In Blue in Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf; an inventive, two-time Bessie Award-winning choreographer (for White Chocolate and Heat) whose work with the Urban Bush Women is the stuff of performance legend; and a unique director, who has helmed the premieres of new work by award-winning writers Sharon Bridgforth, Carl Hancock Rux, Luis Alfaro, Rebecca Rice and Daniel Alexander Jones.

Laurie, Robbie McCauley and Jessica Hagedorn formed the performance group Thought Music in the mid-1980’s producing the revolutionary performance work, Teenytown. Laurie is the co-artistic director, with Marlies Yearby, of Movin’ Spirits Dance Theater Company. For six years Laurie served as Artistic Fellow at Penumbra Theatre Company in St. Paul, Minnesota, the U.S.’s largest, longest-running African American Theatre where she curated the celebrated performance series Non-English Speaking Spoken Here and where she was literary manager for the Cornerstone Play Development Project

Laurie Carlos has received numerous grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Theater Communications Group The McKnight Foundation .She is on the Jerome Foundation Board.