Isaiah Wooden
“I tried to move away from the theater,” he says, “but it kept calling me back.”
As an undergraduate at Georgetown University, though, politics or law seemed to offer more reliable career options. Nevertheless, he agreed to work on a student production of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson. He was working behind the scenes, designing the set. But it was enough to revive his passion.
A few years after graduation, Wooden, who was by then working in the business world, received a phone call. Would he return to Georgetown to be the artistic director of the university’s Black Theater Ensemble? He accepted the offer.
“I tried to move away from the theater,” he says, “but it kept calling me back.”
Knowing he wanted to find a way to combine performance with his scholarship, Wooden completed his Ph.D. at Stanford University under Harry Elam, a renowned scholar of African American theater and performance who is also a professional director.
“He understood the value of being inside the rehearsal room, even as he was producing scholarship that was at the top of the field,” says Wooden.
Like his advisor, Wooden has built a career that blends performance with award-winning scholarship. Last year, the American Society for Theatre Research awarded him the Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship in African American Theatre and Performance Studies.
In 2025, Wooden has published two books: a co-edited volume on the work of August Wilson, whose The Piano Lesson helped convince Wooden to return to the theater; and a monograph titled Reclaiming Time: Race, Temporality, and Black Expressive Culture, about the way Black theater and media arts offer unique experiences of time.
