Angelica Chéri is a playwright, musical theatre bookwriter/lyricist, screenwriter and poet. The plays of her “Prophet’s Cycle Trilogy” include The Seeds of Abraham (Signature Theatre, Billie Holiday Theatre, mentored by Lynn Nottage), The Sting of White Roses (North Carolina Black Repertory Company, National Black Theatre Festival) and Crowndation; I Will Not Lie to David (National Black Theatre-I AM SOUL Residency). Other plays include Berta, Berta (World Premiere at CATF), Slow Gin Fits (Fire This Time Festival) and Learn to Speak Doll (Peppercorn Theatre Commission), a children’s play. Angelica is one of six playwrights selected for the inaugural Writers’ Room at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. She served as Master Playwright in the Frank Silvera Writer’s Workshop Inaugural 3in3 Playwright Festival, and has written for the Obie-Award-Winning 48 Hours in Harlem Festival.
Angelica and collaborator Ross Baum received the prestigious Richard Rodgers Award for their musical Gun & Powder, which has also been selected for the 30th annual NAMT Festival of New Musicals. Gun & Powder has been developed at Goodspeed Musicals, Two River Theater, the NYU Center for New Musicals, the 2017 SigWorks Lab and the NEXT Festival at Theatre Latté Da. Other public presentations include Broadway’s Future Songbook concert series at Lincoln Center and the Drama League’s 2018 DirectorFest. Also with Baum, Angelica was commissioned by Diverging Elements Theatre Company to write the short children’s play A Letter to Auntie Rosa as well as the official anthem of the National Children’s Theater of South Africa.
Her TV pilot Derailed was a semi-finalist in both Showtime’s Tony Cox Episodic Screenplay Competition and the Episodic Comedy Colony in conjunction with the 2017 Nantucket Film Festival. She is a proud member of The Dramatists’ Guild and the New Play Exchange.
Angelica received her BA in Theatre from UCLA, MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University and MFA in Musical Theatre Writing from NYU.