Ang(ela) Bey Rayne
Ang(ela) Bey/Rayne (they/all) is a Black, Queer multidisciplinary artist born and raised in Southwest Philadelphia. Their art imagines liberated futures for Black folx. The inaugural theatre scholarship recipient and 2019 graduate of Ursinus College, Ang is grateful to have worked for over fifty arts and culture institutions nationwide. Rayne’s most recent playwriting commission, On Buried Ground with the Christ Church Preservation Trust, received a grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. Angela is a Barrymore-nominated actor and director and F. Otto Haas Award Finalist through Theatre Philadelphia. Ang(ela)/Rayne is Co-Artistic Director of Shoe Box Theatre Collective and founder of Upstream Performance Collaborative, two scrappy, local theatre companies comprised of even scrappier, extraordinary emerging artists and loved-ones.
Awarded Grants
2023
Art and Change Grant (ACG)
Related grantees
Overview
Ang(ela) Bey's full-length play, WhatWhiteJesusDo? is an Afrofuturist dark comedy about the End-times. When all the white Christians are raptured, the protagonist Miracle struggles to reconcile her faith with her Blackness and teams up with Jake, a white atheist, to survive the Great Tribulation. During this phase of the project, Ang will conduct a series of reading groups, recorded interviews and dialogues with folxs of many races and creeds, to create a rich communal archive that informs WWJD's plot, thematic, and character development.