tv + film + video

Lenelle writes teleplays and screenplays and is a member of the Writers Guild of America. She contributed vignettes to Eyes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground (2021), an IDA-nominated hybrid documentary, currently streaming on HBO Max. She co-wrote Sexual Dependency (2003), a feature-length film, which won the International Film Critics' Award at the Locarno International Film Festival (Switzerland). Lenelle also wrote and starred in the experimental short To Erzulie (2002), which premiered at the Berlin Sommerfest der Literaturen. She was a vocal coach for Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People (2014), a documentary by Thomas Allen Harris. Check out Lenelle’s Vimeo channel for more.

visual art

Lenelle experiments with collage as a form of meditative practice and nonlinear storytelling. She created the cover art for Haiti Glass. Her artwork (crafted with ribbon, paper, paint, pencil, and ink) is visible throughout this website.

Lenelle Moïse ("moy-eez") is a playwright, screenwriter, and the author of Haiti Glass. She writes and performs original poems with heat, heart, humor, movement, and music.

theatre
Inspired by mixtapes and humid summers, Lenelle wrote the romantic comedy K-I-S-S-I-N-G, which The Boston Globe praised for its "incisive portraiture that explores questions of sexuality, sibling dynamics, class...and the mysteries of attraction, all of them firmly rooted in character." K-I-S-S-I-N-G won the 2023 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding New Script. The play is published in its entirety in the Spring 2025 issue of American Theatre magazine. Read an interview about its themes and resonances online.

Tell a truth on purpose.
Tempt with exactitude.
Make the work you need.
Risk being loved.
—Lenelle Moïse

Lenelle wrote and composed the Off-Broadway tour-de-force Expatriate, a two-woman show with all-vocal music. Her play Merit won The Ruby Prize and was featured on The Kilroys' List. She was a Huntington Theatre Company Playwriting Fellow and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellow in Dramatic Writing. She has received awards and development residencies from the Gaea Foundation, Southern Rep, Hedgebrook, the Astraea Foundation, Clark University, New Rep, and Women Center Stage. The New Black Fest commissioned her to write the short play San Francisco Cab for UnTamed. Baltimore Center Stage commissioned her to write Taurus Tornado, a monologue for the My America TV series directed by Hal Hartley.

As a solo performer, Lenelle commands center stage with Black feminist queer immigrant love poems. She has been a guest artist at the United Nations, Lincoln Center, the Norton Museum, Poetry House, and arts institutions, colleges, and conferences across North America. Her evening-length solo shows include Womb-Words, Thirsting, an interactive coming-of-age story and Where There Are Voices, a ritual based on the poems of Haiti Glass. As an actor, Lenelle performed Off-Broadway, co-starring with Karla Mosley in Expatriate. She was an original ensemble member of Rebel Voices, an Off-Broadway play based on Howard Zinn's Voices of a People's History of the United States. As an Artist-in-Residence, Lenelle has taught solo and ensemble performance courses at Northwestern University, UT Austin, and Smith College. More plays here.

publications
Her writing appears in the July/August 2024 issue of POETRY Magazine and in a dozen anthologies, including Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution (2007) and The Kilroys List, Volume Two: 67 Monologues and Scenes by Women and Nonbinary Playwrights (2020). Her work has also been published in Women and Performance, Meridians, No Tokens, Platte Valley Review, Utne Reader, Make/Shift Magazine, Left Turn, Rethinking Schools, and Velvetpark Magazine, among others. Lenelle was a featured writer for the Institute for the Future of the Book’s The Golden Notebook Project.

honors + awards + fellowships

2024 Citation, Harold and Mimi Steinberg/ ATCA New Play Award for K-I-S-S-I-N-G

2024 Finalist, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for K-I-S-S-I-N-G

2023 Winner, Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding New Script for K-I-S-S-I-N-G

2018 Creative Resident, SPACE on Ryder Farm

2018 Playwright-in-Residence at Ithaca College Theatre Arts

2017 Lucille Geier Lakes Writer-in-Residence at Smith College

2017 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in Dramatic Writing

2015 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award for Haiti Glass

2015 Laurel Park Artist in Residence

2014-2015 Next Voices Fellow at New Repertory Theatre

2014 Clark University Theatre Department New Play Commission

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

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

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

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 New WORLD Theater/ Hedgebrook Writing Fellow

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