About Lorna
Lorna Littleway , is founder/producing director of Juneteenth Legacy Theatre, Kentucky's only professional African American Theatre Company. Lorna is a director, playwright, actress, and educator. She is a member of the major entertainment unions for stage and film. She is also a Drama League alum, a member of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, and Immediate Past President of Black Theatre Network (BTN.)
In addition to the plays she has staged for Juneteenth Legacy, Lorna has directed extensively on the regional theatre circuit and at colleges and universities. Some of her credits include: Willie and Esther, featuring Ella Joyce, Black Spectrum (Queens) &National Black Theatre Festival (Winston-Salem, N.C.); Robert Johnson Trick the Devil, 7 Guitars, Home, Kingdom of Earth, Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery, and Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, St. Louis Black Rep; Miss Evers Boys, The Grandmama Tree: a folkfable, Stamford Theatre Works; Honey, Hush! An Uprising Over Some Green , Horizon Theatre (Atlanta); Your Obituary Is a Dance, Actors Theatre; Spunk , New Rep (Boston); Fences , Fleetwood Stage and South Jersey Regional; A Member of the Wedding , TNT (Pa.); Photographs: Lovers in Motion, InterAct (Philadelphia); Mister Bluesman , 5th Biennial National Black Theatre Festival and International Fringe Festival (NYC); A Raisin in the Sun , with Irma Hall , Little Theatre (Dallas) and Lehigh University; for colored girls who've considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, Queens College; The Grapes of Wrath, Iowa State University; Twilight Los Angeles, 1992, The Homecoming, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom , Trouble in Mind and Funnyhouse of a Negro, University of Louisville. Lorna was a Minskoff Fellow at Lehigh University.
Lorna is a 2002 Dramatist Guild Fellow, and a recipient of the 2002 Sallie Bingham Award from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She has received new play development grants from the Drama League and the Stage Directors Foundation, and a playwright fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, 2002 as well as grant support for playwriting from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Lorna's plays, Bang! Bang! Bang!, Young Sistas, Motion and Location, If You Love Me, A Collective Piss and the Devil's Beating His Wife, Fin'ly Free, Billy, Lena and The Duke: A Night of Ellington Music!, Juneteenth Cotton Club Revue, and Kindler Genter Nation have been produced, nationally, at Ensemble Studio, Vital Theatre Company, and FringeNYC [NYTimes review, Margo Jefferson,8/20/05](New York City), Luna Sea (San Francisco), Little Theatre (Dallas), Chocolate Church (Bath, Maine), and Iowa State University (Ames); and at the Kentucky Center, Rudyard Kipling, and Shawnee Park in Louisville. She has also written several plays about 18th Century African-American poet, Phillis Wheatley, and is working on a book for the musical, WAR: Women of the American Revolution. Littleway is also working on an anthology of her plays, Juneteenth Jambalaya.
Lorna has performed in the company's cabaret production . . . A Night of Ellington Music! as "Billy", in the chamber theatre production, The Last Dust Track, assuming the persona of Harlem Renaissance writer, Zora Neale Hurston, and in the 7th Annual Jamboree plays, Passing Ceremonies as "Essex Hemphill" and Diva Daughters DuPree as "Grandma". Lorna, also, was featured lecturer/performer for Women's History Month, 2004, at Central Florida University in Orlando, where she presented Bang! Bang! Bang! and The Last Dust Track.
As an assistant professor, Lorna designed the African American Theatre minor degree program at the University of Louisville, where she was Co-Director of the AATP from '94- '99. She designed courses in African American Theatre History, African American dramatic literature and performance. Professor Littleway also initiated the Juneteenth Festival of New Works: a Cultural Celebration of Emancipation!, which she produced from '97-99. At Iowa State University-Ames, Professor Littleway was Artistic Director of Minority Theatre Workshop ('93.)
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