Eisa Davis

Eisa Davis (born May 5, 1971) is an American playwright, actress, and singer‑songwriter whose multidisciplinary career spans more than four decades of artistic innovation. Born and raised in Berkeley, California, she began formal artistic training early, studying dance, voice, and classical piano through the University of California, Berkeley’s Young Musicians Program, and later honed her craft at Harvard University (B.A.) and the New School for Social Research (M.F.A.) where she double‑majored in playwriting and acting. Her familial ties to activism—she is the niece of famed scholar‑activist Angela Davis—infuse her work with a deep engagement in Black history, identity, and social justice, a theme evident in her autobiographical play Angela’s Mixtape, which chronicles her Bay‑Area upbringing and the political currents that shaped her worldview. Davis’s early professional forays began at age ten on local television, progressing through college‑era stage work, and a move to Los Angeles where she collaborated with Anna Deavere Smith on Twilight, Los Angeles: 1992. As a lifetime member of the Actors Studio and a resident playwright at New Dramatists, she has bridged theatre and hip‑hop culture, contributing essays to Rap Sheet and The Source and participating in the Hip‑Hop Theater Festival. Her play Bulrusher premiered in 2006 at Urban Stages, earned a Pulitzer nomination, and was revived at Berkeley Rep in 2023 before being adapted into an opera by West Edge Opera in 2024, underscoring her enduring impact on contemporary performance.

In addition to her writing, Davis has earned critical acclaim for her acting, receiving an Obie Award for Sustained Excellence in Performance and appearing in notable television series such as The Wire, House of Cards, Mare of Easttown, and Kindred. She also contributed music to the Showtime series Soul Food and released two solo albums, Something Else and Tinctures. Her artistic philosophy, rooted in the Ghanaian principle of Sankofa—“return and collect it”—guides her exploration of lineage, memory, and collective contemplation, as she often states, “Theatre is one of the few public spaces we have for active contemplation."