Lenelle Moïse is a traveling poet, award-winning playwright and solo performance artist who creates jazz-infused, hip-hop bred, politicized texts about Haitian-American identity, creative resistance and the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, memory and spirit. She recites from hand-made scrolls, from memory, with fervor, music and movement. In addition to featured appearances at theatres, bookstores and conferences across the USA and Canada, Moïse has performed at the Louisiana Superdome (for V to the 10th), at the United Nations and Off-Broadway at the Culture Project. The 2010-2012 Poet Laureate of Northampton, MA has also induced standing ovations at a number of colleges and universities. She was the Spring 2011 Mellon Artist in Residence in the Performance Studies department at Northwestern University and the recipient of the 2009-2010 Astraea Lesbian Writers Award in Poetry. She was a Fall 2011 Fellow at the Ellen Stone Belic Institute at Columbia College Chicago and the Spring 2012 Visiting Performing Artist in African & African Diasporic Studies at the UT Austin. Curve Magazine calls her debut CD Madivinez “piercing, covering territory both intimate and political...vivid and powerful.” She is available to perform: Ache What Make, a ritual-in-progress about calamity, compassion and death-defying love; Womb-Words, Thirsting, her acclaimed autobiographical coming of age performance; and Speaking Intersections, a dynamic set of poetry and performative prose. Email booking@lenellemoise.com for details. Bring Lenelle to your campus.

Moïse is a current Huntington Theatre Company Playwriting Fellow. She earned an MFA in Playwriting from Smith College in 2004. Her two-act play Merit won the 2011-2012 Ruby Prize. In 2008, the Culture Project launched the Off-Broadway production of Expatriate, her critically-acclaimed two-woman show with all-vocal music (download The New York Times review). Her other plays include: Matermorphosis, Little Griot, Spilling Venus, The Many Faces of Nia, Cornered in the Dark, and Purple. As an actor, she co-stars with Karla Mosley in Expariate and appeared in the Off-Broadway production of Rebel Voices, a play based on the book Voices of a People's History of the United States.

 

Lenelle’s poems and essays are featured in several anthologies, including: Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution and We Don't Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists. Her writing has also been published in the Platte Valley Review, Utne Reader, Make/Shift Magazine, Left Turn, Rethinking Schools, the legendary OurChart.com and Velvetpark Magazine. In 2008, she was a featured writer for The Golden Notebook Project, the Institute for the Future of the Book’s online experiment in collective close-reading.

MUSIC

Lenelle’s newest CD, The Expatriate Amplification Project features playful, poly-rhythmic, all-vocal music about love, homeland, flight and freedom. She often incorporates music into solo performances.

FILM & VIDEO

At age 20, Lenelle co-wrote Sexual Dependency, Bolivian director Rodrigo Bellot's feature film debut about cross-cultural machismo and U.S. media influence on the youth of the global south. Currently out on DVD, the film won the International Film Critics' Award at the Locarno International Film Festival (Switzerland) and has since been screened and awarded in dozens of festivals and cinemas on four continents. Moïse also wrote and starred in Mara Alper's short experimental video To Erzulie which premiered at the Berlin Sommerfest der Literaturen in July 2002. She has completed her own experimental shorts Blue Passersby Eyes and Atlantic Soul. Her self-produced music video Pied Piper was an official selection of the International Museum of Women's 2007 Online Film Festival. Lenelle’s distinct voice is featured in Step by Step: Keeping the Arts Alive, a 30-minute documentary by Julie Akeret. Check out Lenelle’s YouTube channel for more.

 

HONORS & AWARDS

2012-2014 Huntington Theatre Company Playwriting Fellow

2012 Spring Performing Artist Fellow, African & African Diaspora Studies @ UT Austin

2011-2012 Southern Rep Ruby Prize for Merit

2011 Fall Fellow, Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women & Gender in Arts & Media

2011 Mellon Artist-in-Residence in Performance Studies @ Northwestern University

2011 The Root’s Faves: The Top 30 Black Performance Poets

2011 Guest Artist for Sharon Bridgforth’s Theatrical Jazz Institute @ DePaul University

2010-2012 Poet Laureate of Northampton, MA

2010 Hedgebrook Women Playwrights Festival Fellow

2010 Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund Award in Poetry

2008 Black Women Playwrights Group Whisper Laugh Shout Award

2008 GO Magazine’s 100 Women We Love

2008 Hedgebrook/ New WORLD Theater Writing Fellow

2008 GO Magazine’s Literary Lesbians: 15 Exceptional Wordsmiths We Love

2007 Patchwork Majority Radio Award for Best Solo Album: Madivinez

2006 Gaea Foundation Sea Change Residency

2005-2006 Astraea Loving Lesbians Award for Poetry

2004 Drammy for Best Ensemble Acting: Cornered in the Dark

2004 & 2003 James Baldwin Memorial Award in Playwriting

2003 New WORLD Theater Poetry Slam Champion

2001 & 2000 National Poetry Slam competitor with Team Ithaca, NY

 

VISUAL ART

Lenelle experiments with collage as a form of meditative practice and nonlinear storytelling. Details of her visual artwork can be found all over this website. In December 2007, she presented her collection “URBAN WINGS” as part of a group show at the Hosmer Gallery in Northampton, MA. See the slideshow below for a glimpse of these vibrant mixed media works.