Bio
Mojisola Adebayo works as a playwright, performer, director, producer and educator. Born in South London in 1968, the artist is of Nigerian and Danish heritage. She studied theatre at both Royal Holloway University and the University of Surrey, after which she later conducted doctoral research on the intersection between queerness and Black British theatre at Queen Mary University of London. In 2005, she decided to turn her theatre practice into her primary focus. Alongside her engagement with writing and performance, Adebayo works as a professor in Theatre Writing and Performance Practice at Queen Mary University of London. She also frequently mentors bourgeoning new dramatists by organising theatre workshops. In 2018, she was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Adebayo has written the scripts of more than thirty plays, and many of these have been staged across the world. This has brought her dramaturgical work to an international audience. Her career as a playwright took off with the production of Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey in 2005. The play, which she had researched on Antarctica earlier that year, addresses themes of whiteness, slavery and climate change. She followed this with more activist drama pieces, such as the semi-autobiographical play Muhammad Ali and Me (2008) and Matt Henson: North Star (2012). Desert Boy (2008) was her first commissioned play, focusing on the figure of Stephen Lawrence and black-on-black violence. In partnership with Ashtar Theatre Palestine, her play 48 Minutes for Palestine has been touring across the world since 2010. The Listeners, a play for young actors, premiered in 2012.
The playwright staged her verbatim play The Interrogation of Sandra Bland in 2017 with the help of the Black Lives, Black Worlds international theatre project. In 2021, she launched her play Family Tree to the British stage, covering themes of capitalism and climate justice in relation to the perception of Black women’s bodies. Her subsequent experimental piece of drama, STARS (2023), constitutes a collaboration with various member of the music scene in order to create a play that transcends the stage. She also co-wrote an activist play entitled The Architect (2023) together with Roy Williams and Matthew Xia. This piece reenacts the unjust murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 by bringing the audience on a double-decker bus across London.
In her writing, Adebayo aims to construct a space for illuminating the voices of various marginalised communities. The role of social change is central here as she focuses on matters of race, sexuality and disability. Her writing has a socio-political and critical tone to it, drawing attention to topics that deserve greater discussion.
• https://mojisolaadebayo.co.uk/
Selected Prizes and Nominations
• Alfred Fagon Award – Best New Play 2021
• Off West End Theatre Award – Best New Play 2024
• The Stage Awards – Innovation Award 2024
• Offies London – Best Play 2024
Bibliography
Adebayo, Mojisola. "48 Minutes for Palestine." Theatre in Pieces: An Anthology of Experimental Theatre from 1968-2010, edited by Anna Furse, Bloomsbury Methuen, 2011.
—."Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey." Hidden Gems, edited by Deirdre Osborne, Oberon Books, 2008, pp. 149–190.
—. Mojisola Adebayo: Plays One. Oberon Books, 2011.
—."Muhammad Ali and Me." Mojisola Adebayo: Plays One, Oberon Books, 2011, pp. 65–156.
—. Family Tree. Metheun Drama, 2023.
Adebayo, Mojisola and Goddard, Lynette (editors). Black British Queer Plays and Practitioners, Bloomsbury Methuen, 2022.
—. “Wind / Rush Generation(s).” National Theatre Connections: 2020, edited by Ola Aminashawun, Methuen, 2021, n.p.
—. Mojisola Adebayo: Plays Two. Oberon Books, 2019.
—. Mojisola Adebayo: Plays One. Oberon, 2011.
—. “Emotional Rescue: How Personal Trauma Has Been Turned Into Art.” Interview with Paula Cocozza, The Guardian, 12 May 2017.
Adebayo, Mojisola, John Martin, and Manisha Mehta. The Theatre for Development Handbook, Pan Intercultural Arts, 2010.
Adebayo, Mojisola, Valerie Mason-John, and Deirdre Osborne. “‘No Straight Answers’: Writing in the Margins, Finding Lost Heroes.” New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 1, 2009: pp. 6-21.
Akbar, Arifa. “The Architect Review – Stephen Lawrence Tribute is a Deeply Moving Ride.” Rev, of The Architect, by Mojisola Adebayo, Roy Williams and Matthew Xia, The Guardian, 10 Sept 2023.
Baas, Renzo. “Travel Beyond Stars: Trauma and Future in Mojisola Adebayo’s STARS.” Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, vol. 9, no. 1, 2021: pp. 95-113.
Bühler-Dietrich, Annette. “Fighting Racism on the Contemporary Francophone Stage.” The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Race, edited by Tiziana Morosetti and Osita Okagbue, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, pp. 307-326,
Fisher, Mark. “Family Tree Review – Study of the Mother of Modern Medicine Falls Between Poetry and Play.” Rev. of Family Treem by Mojisola Adebayo, The Guardian, 15 March 2023.
Goddard, Lynette. “Black Lives, Black Worlds at the Bush Theatre: Art, Anger, Affect and Activism.” Affects in 21st-Century British Theatre: Exploring Feeling on Stage and Page, edited by Mireia Aragay, Cristina Delgado-Garciá and Martin Middeke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, pp. 107-126.
Hickling, Alfred. “Desert Boy.” Rev, of Desert Boy, by Mojisola Adebayo, The Guardian, 27 March 2010.
López, Paola Prieto. “Black Lives, Black Worlds: Transnational Solidarity and Collective Artistic Activism.” Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association, vol. 42, no. 2, 2020, pp. 197-213.
—. “The Performance of Black Youth Masculinity in Bola Agbaje and Mojisola Adebayo’s Council-Estate Plays.” Performing Cultures of Inequality, Routledge, 2022, pp. 30-43.
—. ““Let Us Start by Listening”: Oppositional Dialogues in Gloria Williams’s Bullet Hole, Charlene James’s Cuttin’ It, Cora Bissett and Yusra Warsama’s Rites and Mojisola Adebayo’s Stars.” Black Women Centre Stage: Diasporic Solidarity in Contemporary Black British Theatre, Routledge, 2024, n.p.
Löschnigg, Maria. “Looking at 'Experiences on the Edge of the Edge'.” Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, vol. 8, no. 1, 2010, pp. 115-126.
Moll, Ellen. "Gender, Authenticity, and Diasporic Identities in Adebayo's Moj of the Antarctic and Iizuka's 36 Views." Comparative Drama, vol. 49, no. 2, 2015, pp. 191-224.
Nielsen, Hanne E.F. "Staging the south: two contemporary Antarctic plays." The Polar Journal, vol. 5, no. 1, 2015, pp. 203-217.
Osborne, Deirdre. "Skin Deep, a Self-Revealing Act: Monologue, Monodrama, and Mixedness in the Work of SuAndi and Mojisola Adebayo." Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, vol. 1, no. 1, 2013, pp. 54–69.
Rodríguez, Verónica. "The uber-performing uterus of Henrietta Lacks and Eve Ensler: Ecologies of the womb in Mojisola Adebayo's Family Tree and Eve Ensler's In the Body of the World." The Routledge Companion to Performance and Medicine, Routledge, 2024, pp. 45-56.
Scafe, Suzanne. "Performing Ellen: Mojisola Adebayo’s Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey (2008) and Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860)." Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 55, no. 3, 2019, pp. 406-420.
