Alum spotlight : Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green (MFA ’03)

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Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green, MFA 2003, Theatre Pedagogy

avgreen@wm.edu

When she was 13, Omiyẹmi’s grandmother gave her a copy of for colored girls… and it changed her life. “I saw it through a new lens.” She says, “I knew at ten that I wanted to be a lawyer, and my mom researched colleges and said ‘you’re going to William & Mary.’ It took my mom a minute to recover when I decided on theatre instead.” As a member of her university’s African American Theatre Club, she later directed the play for colored girls… as a college senior.

In another twist, she started college at William & Mary majoring in Psychology, but a freshman writing seminar on African American Theatre “helped me understand why people do what they do. That’s been the thru line in all of my work since then.”

Omiyẹmi credits fellow alum Renee Charlow (MFA ’02) for helping her get her first teaching job at Morgan State University as a lecturer. She recalls, “The range of courses taught prepared me for the next job.” That was at Chicago State University, where she was an Assistant Professor for five years and also artist-in-residence at the Purdue University Black Cultural Center.

In 2009, while at Chicago State, Omiyẹmi applied for tenure, while also applying to teach at William & Mary and…she got both! When she accepted the appointment at William & Mary, she became the first Black faculty member in the Department of Theatre, Speech, and Dance in sixty years. She’s now the first Black woman to achieve tenure and early promotion to full Professor in Theatre.

In 2018, Omiyẹmi spent two weeks in Abeokuta, Nigeria to become a priest of Yemoja, an African deity celebrated as the giver of life. That’s where she received her name Omiyẹmi, which means “water befits me.”

She’s also been president of the Black Theatre Network and is Executive Editor of the Black Theatre Review (formerly Continuum: The Journal of African Diaspora Drama, Theatre and Performance). Omiyẹmi recently became involved with Cadence Theatre in Richmond to create Sitelines BLM, for underrepresented artists in historically white institutions. From the Cadence site, the goal of Sitelines BLM “is to continue to center the voices of artists from the Global Majority and create new ‘seeing places’ that celebrate cultural heritage and bring communities together.”



Compiled by Liz Hopper (professor emeritus) and Jerry Williams (BFA ’71) for the May 2023 Theatre Alumni newsletter