Katori Hall

Katori Hall (born May 10, 1981) is an American playwright, screenwriter, producer, actress, and director from Memphis, Tennessee. Hall's best known works include the hit television series P-Valley, the Tony-nominated Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, and plays such as Hurt Village, Our Lady of Kibeho, Children of Killers, The Mountaintop, and The Hot Wing King, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Early life and education Hall's parents moved the family from Raleigh, North Carolina, to a predominantly white neighborhood in Memphis, Tennessee, when she was five years old. She graduated from Craigmont High School as the first Black valedictorian in the school's history, and received her bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 2003 with a major in African-American Studies and Creative Writing. As a student, she was a resident of John Jay Hall. Hall was initially a student in the theater department, where she took classes with fellow student Kelly McCreary. Eventually she switched majors because she felt the faculty and students were inhospitable to her perspective and writing. She was awarded top departmental honors from the university's Institute for Research in African-American Studies. In 2005 she graduated from the American Repertory Theater/Moscow Art Theater Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University with a Master of Fine Arts in Acting . During this time she revised the script for Hoodoo Love, the first full-length play she wrote. In 2006, it was selected by Lynn Nottage for the Cherry Lane Theatre Mentor Project. It premiered off-Broadway at Cherry Lane Theatre and received positive critical reception. Hall graduated from the Juilliard School's Lila Acheson Wallace playwriting program in 2009. In the program she workshopped the script for The Mountaintop.