JUSTIN EMEKA
director/filmmaker
BIO
Justin Emeka is a visionary director, writer, and filmmaker whose creative voice spans both stage and screen. With over two decades of theater experience, he has directed at leading institutions including The Old Globe, Philadelphia Theatre Company, Syracuse Stage, Two River Theater, Seattle Rep, Juilliard, and Classical Theatre of Harlem. He serves on the Executive Board of SDC, the professional director’s union. As Resident Director at Pittsburgh Public Theater, he helmed acclaimed productions such as Trouble in Mind, Sweat, and his original reimagining A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Harlem. In recent years, Emeka has emerged as a powerful voice in filmmaking. A 2022 Drama League Fellow in TV/Film Directing, he served as shadow director on the Disney+ limited series A Small Light. His first short film, Six Winters Gone Still, premiered at the Black Harvest Film Festival in Chicago, and his second, BIOLOGICAL, won Best Short at the Kansas City FilmFest International. His third short Songs of Black Folk is set to premiere at Tribeca Film Festival in June 2025. Emeka’s cinematic work blends poetic realism with bold cultural storytelling, signaling a dynamic new chapter in his artistic journey. As a tenured professor at Oberlin College in Africana Studies and Theater, Emeka has also contributed critical essays including “Seeing Shakespeare Through Brown Eyes.”.
A long-time educator, Emeka is an Associate Professor of Theater and Africana Studies at Oberlin College where he teaches directing, acting, and Capoeira Angola. For the Oberlin MainStage, he directed Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (featuring Avery Brooks and Petronia Paley); Antigone by Zora Howard; Macbeth by Shakespeare; The Bluest Eye by Lydia Diamond and Wedding Band by Alice Childress. As a guest artist at Juilliard, he directed Lucas Hnath's A Doll House pt. 2 and at NYU Grad Acting he directed and adapted Moliere's The Would-Be Gentleman into The Boougie Gentleman. At the University of Washington's Ethnic Cultural Theatre he directed Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie; Amiri Baraka's Dutchman; and Aishah Rahman's Unfinished Women Cry in No Man's Land While a Bird Dies in a Guilded Cage. At Yale Rep, he served as the movement coordinator and played the role of Edgar in an all-Black production of King Lear starring Avery Brooks directed by Hal Scott. He has taught workshops at New York University, Julliard, Carnegie Mellon, Old Globe, University of Michigan, Skidmore College and more. He is also a writer and has received awards in playwriting from the Seattle Arts Commission, and screenwriting from the Washington State Film Commission. He also published, "Playing with Race in the New Millennium" in the book "Casting a Movement".
IMMAGINATIVE APPROACHES TO EPIC AND CONTEMPORARY STORYTELLING