2022 Honorees

Dede Ayite

Dede Ayite

Costume Design Design – 2022 Honoree for Merry Wives

Dede Ayite is a two-time Tony award nominated costume designer working in theater, opera and film. Arriving at costume design from a background in behavioral neuroscience and theater, her most recent Broadway credits include American Buffalo, How I Learned to Drive, A Soldier’s Play, Slave Play, Chicken & Biscuits, American Son, and Children of a Lesser God. Her select Off-Broadway credits include Richard III, Merry Wives (The Public Theater); Seven Deadly Sins (Tectonic); Secret Life of Bees, Marie and Rosetta, (Atlantic); By The Way, Meet Vera Stark, (Signature); Nollywood Dreams, BLKS, School Girls… (MCC); Bella: An American Tall Tale (Playwrights Horizons); The Royale (Lincoln Center); Toni Stone (Roundabout). Regionally, Ayite’s work has appeared at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Steppenwolf, Arena Stage and more. She has worked in television with Netflix, Comedy Central, and FOX Shortcoms. Ayite earned her MFA at the Yale School of Drama and has received an Obie, Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, Helen Hayes, Theatre Bay Area, and Jeff Award.

Kathy A. Perkins

Kathy A. Perkins

Lighting Design – 2022 Honoree for Trouble in Mind

Kathy A. Perkins’s career as a lighting designer spans nearly 45 years including Broadway, Off-Broadway, dance and regional theatres such as American Conservatory Theatre, Arena Stage, Berkeley Repertory, Seattle Repertory, St. Louis Black Repertory, Alliance, Goodman, Steppenwolf, Baltimore Center Stage, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, New Federal Theatre, Mark Taper, Two River, Yale Repertory, Actors Theatre of Louisville, People’s Light, Triad and Playmakers Repertory. Her designs have been seen internationally in South Africa. She has also devoted her career as an educator to increasing the number of designers of color.

As a scholar, she is the editor of seven anthologies focusing on women both nationally and internationally, including Selected Plays: Alice Childress. She is a senior editor of the Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance.

Kathy has traveled to nearly fifty countries as both designer and lecturer and is the recipient of numerous research and design awards, including Ford Foundation, Fulbright, National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and an NAACP Image Award. She received the 2021 United States Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT) Distinguished Achievement Award for both Education and Lighting Design.

In 1995, Kathy co-curated ONSTAGE: A Century of African American Stage Design at New York’s Lincoln Center. In 2016 she served as theatre consultant for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture inaugural exhibition Taking the Stage.

In 2007 she was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. She received her BFA from Howard University and her M.F.A. from the University of Michigan.

Kathy is faculty Emerita at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has been a member of USA since 1986.

Mikaal Sulaiman

Mikaal Sulaiman

Notable Effects – Sound Design – 2019 Honoree for Fairview,
Sound Design – 2022 Honoree for Sanctuary City

Mikaal Sulaiman is a Tony award nominated multi-disciplinary artist who works across film, tv, and theatre. Mikaal is a writer, director, sound designer, and composer. As a writer, he is currently in a writer’s room on a new episodic show for A24/Amazon created by Ramy Youssef. He most recently collaborated with his older brother, Amir Sulaiman, on a short film called Laying Flowers.:.Setting Fires for which he was the Creative Director and Editor. As theatre deviser he has received artist residencies at Space on Ryder Farm in Upstate New York, UCross Foundation in Wyoming, as well as VoxFest at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. As a sound designer he has worked on award winning productions that include: Macbeth (Broadway), Thoughts of a Colored Man (Broadway), Sanctuary City (New York Theatre Workshop), Rags Parkland (Ars Nova), Fairview (Soho Rep) *Pulitzer Prize winner for Drama, and Underground Railroad Game (Ars Nova), among others. His nominations include the Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, Lucille Lortel Award, Bay Area Theatre Critics, and Audelco Award. He received the 2021 CTG Sherwood Award and the 2019 Henry Hewes Design Award for excellence in Sound Design. Most recently he was one of the 2022 Creative Capital Award recipients. Mikaal is currently a professor at The Yale School of Drama as Head of the Sound Design Concentration. He attended the University of the Arts receiving a BFA and later studied the Jacques Lecoq approach to avant-garde theatre at the London International School of Performing Arts.

Visit his website at: https://www.mikaal.com/about

David Bengali

David Bengali

Media Design – 2022 Honoree for Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

David Bengali is a Projection Designer based in New York City. Selected recent designs include: Broadway: 1776 (Roundabout/A.R.T.); Off-Broadway and regional: Here There Are Blueberries (Tectonic Theater Project/La Jolla Playhouse); The Visitor (The Public Theater - Lortel Nom.); Bhangin' It (La Jolla Playhouse, Huntington Theatre Co.); Bollywood Kitchen (Geffen Playhouse); Twilight: LA 1992 (Signature Theatre - Drama Desk Nom., A.R.T.); Einstein's Dreams (Prospect/59E59 - Drama Desk Nom.); We Live In Cairo (A.R.T); Girls (Yale Rep); Van Gogh’s Ear (Ensemble for the Romantic Century - Drama Desk Nom.); The Great Leap (Atlantic Theater Co.); Frankenstein (Dallas Theater Center); The Temple Bombing (Alliance Theatre); Uncommon Sense (Tectonic Theater Project); Anna Akhmatova (Brooklyn Academy of Music). Touring: Rockin' Road To Dublin (National Tour); Streaming: Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical (Seaview); Circle Jerk (Fake Friends); MFA: NYU. Member: USA-829.

He was a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow and teaches at Princeton and NYU.

James Ortiz

James Ortiz

Noteable Effects in Puppetry Design – 2022 Honoree for The Skin of Our Teeth

James Ortiz is a cross-disciplinary designer, deviser, and director whose recent creation of Milky White at Into the Woods on Broadway as well as the Dino designs for Lincoln CenterTheater’s Tony nominated production of The Skin of Our Teeth have both become fan favorites. Most recently: As You Like It for the Public Theater. Soon: Disney’s Hercules, Kiss my Aztec at Hartford Stage. Previous credits include: The Public Theater, Carnegie Melon University, Dallas Theatre Center, Shakespeare Theatre of DC, Opera Saratoga, Ars Nova, and New World Stages. 2016 OBIE winner for puppetry design for his off-Broadway creation, The Woodsman. American Theatre magazine of “Six Theatre Workers you Should Know” in 2020. 2022 Drama Desk winner for The Skin of our Teeth.

Visit his website at: https://www.jamesortiz.co