Shona Tucker
Shona Tucker is the Mary Riepma Ross Chair and Full Professor of Drama. A Fulbright Scholar, Schomburg Fellow, Audelco Award winner, and Broadway actress, she joined the faculty in 2008.
She has performed extensively, including as a company member of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for three years, and has professional affiliations with The Actors Center, YARA Arts, the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, and New York Theatre Workshop, where she is a Usual Suspect. Her artistic interests focus on adapting literature from around the world for the stage, comedy, and global theater.
Tucker is the former Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Louisville. She has taught at Ramapo College and Columbia University and has led workshops at the University of Sierra Leone, Harvard, and Yale. She holds a BS in Speech from Northwestern University and an MFA in Acting from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Acting Program.
Shona Tucker is a Full Professor and the Mary Riepma Ross Chair in Drama. She joined the faculty as Acting Professor in August 2008, the day after performing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) in Ashland, Oregon, where she was a company member for three years. Tucker maintains professional affiliations with YARA Arts (a Ukrainian/American theater company), New York Theatre Workshop as a Usual Suspect, The Actors Center, and the Lincoln Center Directors Lab.
As an actress, Tucker is an original cast member of the Broadway productions To Kill a Mockingbird with Jeff Daniels and Death of a Salesman with Wendell Pierce. Her Off-Broadway credits include The New York Shakespeare Festival, Circle in the Square, Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Theatre Club, and La MaMa ETC. Additional regional and national theater credits include Yale Repertory Theatre, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Stageworks/Hudson, Arena Stage, The Acting Company, American Conservatory Theater, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, and Indiana Repertory Theatre.
Her television and film work includes The Hating Game, Linoleum, Lights Out, Preaching to the Choir: On the One, Third Watch, New York Undercover, Law & Order, One Life to Live, and Trinity. Her artistic interests focus on adapting literature from around the world for the stage, as well as exploring multiple forms of comedic performance.
As a writer, Tucker has completed Mississippi Mud, a trilogy based on true stories of three “regular” African American women whose major life choices transform their families’ histories. The second installment of the trilogy, Growing Wild, was featured in the #HealMeToo Festival at IRT Theater in 2019, and an excerpt was published in The Good River Review (Spaulding College, Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing). She is currently completing a pilot with the working title What Had Happened Was… and has co-authored a chapter in Community-Engaged Praxis in Peace, Social Justice, and Human Rights Education: Partnering for Transformative Change (Teachers College Press, Spring 2026).
Tucker is an Audelco Award winner, a Schomburg Fellow, and a Fulbright Scholar. She is the former Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Louisville. She has taught at Ramapo College and Columbia University and has led workshops at Harvard and Yale. She holds a BS in Speech from Northwestern University and an MFA in Acting from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Contact
Box 178
Departments and Programs
Courses
DRAM 200 The Experimental Theater
DRAM 306 The Art of Acting: Comedy
