Kemp Powers

Kemp Powers is a Golden Globe Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, playwright, director and producer. His plays include One Night in Miami... , Little Black Shadows , Christa McAuliffe's Eyes Were Blue and The Two Reds. He received the 2013 Ted Schmitt Award for Outstanding New Play for the world premiere of One Night in Miami... in Los Angeles. That production also won three LA Drama Critics Circle Awards and four NAACP Theatre Awards. One Night 's 2016 production at London...See more

Kemp Powers is a Golden Globe Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, playwright, director and producer. His plays include One Night in Miami... , Little Black Shadows , Christa McAuliffe's Eyes Were Blue and The Two Reds. He received the 2013 Ted Schmitt Award for Outstanding New Play for the world premiere of One Night in Miami... in Los Angeles. That production also won three LA Drama Critics Circle Awards and four NAACP Theatre Awards. One Night 's 2016 production at London's Donmar Warehouse was nominated for an Olivier Award for Best New Play. His work has been developed at South Coast Repertory, Denver Center Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Classical Theatre of Harlem, among others. Powers also wrote the Academy Award-nominated 2020 feature adaptation of One Night in Miami.. . produced by Amazon studios. Directed by Regina King (in her directorial debut), the film debuted to universal acclaim at the Venice and Toronto International Film Festivals before launching on Amazon Prime Video. He is also the co-director and screenwriter of Disney/Pixar's Academy Award-winning 2020 animated feature Soul , making him the first black co-director of a Disney or Pixar animated feature. The film, which was accepted into the Cannes Film Festival and premiered to rave reviews at the London Film Festival, featured the voices of Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey, Daveed Diggs and Angela Bassett, among others. His upcoming feature films include directing Spider- Man: Across the Spider-verse and penning a live action adaptation of the BOOM! Comics series Irredeemable and Incorruptible produced by Jay-Z, director Jeymes Samuel and James Lassiter. Previously, Powers wrote for the popular CBS All Access series, Star Trek: Discovery . He has toured nationally as a storyteller for the Peabody Award-winning series, "The Moth ," and was one of the storytellers published in the first edition of their New York Times -bestselling book, The Moth: 50 True Stories . Prior to his work in stage, television and film, Powers was a journalist for 17 years. See less