Nina Angela Mercer on Clubhouse

Bio

I am a cultural worker and interdisciplinary artist born & raised in DC, initiated in the ways of the Gogo, once living in the Bronx for 15 years, now back in my home city DC.

My plays include GUTTA BEAUTIFUL(The Warehouse Theatre, The Woolly Mammoth for DC’s Fringe, Abrons Arts Center, Little Carib Theatre); ITAGUA MEJI: A Road & A Prayer (Brecht Forum, Alternate Roots, Rutgers University Newark and New Brunswick, The Nuyorican Poets Café); GYPSY & THE BULLY DOOR(The Warehouse Theatre, the former Dumbo Sky); ELIJAHEEN BECOMES WIND (Anacostia Arts Center); CHARISMA AT THE CROSSROADS (Dorothy Young Arts Center); SPARROW(The Langston Hughes House); and A COMPULSION FOR BREATHING (The Schomburg Center and Target Margin Theater).

Honored to be the collaborating writer for Urban Bush Women’s Haint Blu. Premiering in New Orleans with Junebug Productions in Jan 2023. I am also performing. Check us out in Nola, Miami, The Berkshires, Harlem, and Martha’s Vineyard. 2023, y’all.

My writing is published in The Killens Review of Arts & Letters; Black Renaissance Noire; Voices Magazine #SayHerName Edition; Continuum: The Journal of African Diaspora Drama, Theatre, and Performance; A Gathering of the Tribes; Break Beat Poets Vol 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Press, 2018); Are You Entertained? Black Popular Culture in the 21st Century (Duke University Press, 2020); Performance Research Journal; and Represent! New Plays for Multicultural Young People (Bloomsbury Press, 2021), So We Can Know (Haymarket, 2023).

I also put my body into performance when I feel called. Most recently, I joined Angela’s Pulse for Paloma McGregor’s Building A Better Fishtrap/From the River’s Mouth, and for my own video poem, created in collaboration with director Toshi Sakai, “Invocation for Josè Antonio Aponte.”

I also work as a dramaturge and professor.

I am executive director of Ocean Ana Rising, Inc., an arts education organization.

I make devotional gris gris and a way out of no way. Look out for my installation and performance - Mirrors, Shadows, This Body, and Tea … Soon.

I am the inaugural fellow at The Woodshed Center for Art, Thought, and Culture at the Racial Justice Institute at Georgetown University.

I am myself and my selves.

I am a mother to two grown daughters.