Nefertiti Burton is a theatre artist and educator who has worked on stage, in television, and in industrial films. Ms. Burton's directing focuses on contemporary plays by authors of color such as Pearl Cleage, August Wilson, Aishah Rahman, and Elizabeth Wong, but her work has included modern European dramas by Lorca, Brecht, and Beckett as well as classical Greek plays. In the 1980s she co-founded the Black Folks Theater Company in Boston, Massachusetts and later became a Resident Director for New WORLD Theater Company in Amherst. In 1996, while a member of the Theatre faculty at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, she directed an Audelco Award winning production in New York City for the Carolina Playwrights Center. In June and July, 2003 she co-directed a workshop production of Middle Passage: A Healing Ritual by Fatima Dike at the Grahamstown Arts Festival in South Africa.
As an actor, Ms. Burton was a member of The ROSE Shakespeare Company in Boston and toured internationally with New WORLD Theater in Endesha Holland's two-woman play, Miss Ida B. Wells. She was featured in Monsieur Baptiste, The Con Man at the 1999 National Black Theatre Festival. Ms. Burton's television credits include featured roles in the TV miniseries Common Ground and the made-for-tv movie, A Matter of Principle. She has authored a number of plays for children and wrote the screenplay for More Than Meets The Eye, a 30 minute video on race relations which won the Crystal award in AFTRA's American Scene Awards.
Ms. Burton's administrative experience is extensive. As co-founder and Executive Director of Middle Passage Educational and Cultural Resources Burton developed and delivered arts and arts service programs to the people of Massachusetts for over ten years. She has been a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, The Massachusetts Cultural Council, and The Arts & Science Council of Charlotte, North Carolina. Burton has acted as a consultant for the National Endowment for the Arts, The Association of Performing Arts Presenters, The New England Foundation for the Arts, and many other local, regional and national arts agencies. Her production, performance and consulting activities have taken her to Africa, China, Japan, Australia, South America, and the Caribbean. In summer, 2003 she led a delegation of University of Louisville students and faculty to South Africa to participate in the South Africa Theatre Exchange with students and faculty from Guga s'Thebe Cultural Center in Langa Township. Since that time she has continued to be a catalyst for theatre exchanges between the University of Louisville and organizations in Cape Town.
Ms. Burton holds an MFA in Directing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a B.A. in Theatre from Clark University in Worcester, MA, and a Research Certificate in Media/Arts Program Development from the Community Fellows Program of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She teaches in the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Louisville where she is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies.
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