Latrelle Bright

Biography

Latrelle Bright is a director, performer and arts advocate. Illinois Theatre and the Krannert Center – No Child…, Dreamgirls, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Cabaret and Sweat.  As a freelance theatre maker and arts advocate rooted in the Champaign-Urbana community, Latrelle has directed at The Station Theatre – Men on Boats, Fun Home, Sleep Deprivation Chamber, The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds and Parkland College – The Story, Elephant’s Graveyard and A Charlie Brown Christmas and co-director of The Tempest for CUTC.  Past directing credits include The Taming of the Shrew (Rhodes College), Top Dog/Underdog (Hattiloo Theatre), Hedda Gabler and The Castle (UofMemphis), Otherwise Occupied and Lost Recipes (Jump Start Performance Company) and Spell #7 and Betrayal (The Renaissance Guild).  Her interest in storytelling extends to social justice and the environment where she has trained with Alternate Roots, Sojourn Summer Institute, Double Edge Theatre, Sandglass Puppet Theatre and Dell’Arte International.  Projects include: co-producer of The Gun Play(s) Project with Nicole Anderson-Cobb, PhD; The Water Project, devised with eight local community members and Journey to Water, connecting African Americans with regional water sources, a collaboration with Prairie Rivers Network through a Catalyst Initiative Grant from the Center for Performance and Civic Practice; and Stories in the Water exploring deeply rooted relationships black people have with our most precious resource, that premiered at Memphis Fringe.  She has engaged in an interdisciplinary devised project about the quantum world with physics professor Smitha Vishveshwara, Quantum Voyages that premiered on campus, traveled to Boston for the American Physical Society Conference and a Zoom production (due to the pandemic) with students from the UofI and UC San Diego.  She co-directed This is the Ground for Opera on Tap NYC with Jerre Dye at the Old Stone House in Park Slope, Brooklyn.  Locally, she continues developing short theatre pieces about resistance through her grant funded Arachne Project.  She is a recipient of the Allerton Artist-in-Residence program (with Nicole Anderson-Cobb) and completed a new piece; The Joy of Regathering, with Smitha Vishveshwara, Stephen Taylor (Music) and Jeff Moore (Beckman Institute) that premiered at Krannert in the fall of 2022.  Recently, she worked on two new plays – Honey Bee Baby by Erlina Ortiz(Rivendell Theatre Ensemble) and The Birds of North America by Matthew Erlbach (Illinois Theatre): Latrelle received her MFA in Directing from The University of Memphis, was a TCG Young Leader of Color and an Associate Member of Stage Director’s and Choreographers Society.