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The Many Faces of Professor Ingrid Griffith

Ingrid Griffith, an adjunct member of the Department of Communication and Theatre Arts, has been enjoying a very busy — and fruitful — past year, having just completed a premiere engagement of her sold-out, critically acclaimed one-woman show “Demerara Gold.”

Griffith is an actor and working performance artist in addition to teaching Introduction to Theatre (DRA 110) and Communication and Civic Engagement (COM 155). She based “Demerara Gold” on her own life story to tell the tale of an indomitable 7-year-old Guyanese girl and her discovery of her true birthright. The play was selected for this summer’s Midtown International Theatre Festival in New York, and will be presented again in a special two-night engagement at A.R.T. New York – South Oxford Space in Brooklyn, on Oct. 17 and 18.

Playing no fewer than 18 different characters in the play, Griffith shifts easily from fierce to farcical, from a young girl to an arthritic grandmother, in a dramatic arc that was described in the online Huffington Post as “a coming-of-age story about the effects of immigration on personal identity and family dynamics.

“My show focuses on the Caribbean-American experience and is a story that our diverse student body and colleagues can identify with,” said Griffith.
“Demerara Gold” recently earned Griffith a national award for Heritage Journalism from the Guyana Cultural Association. “This pioneering one-woman show has been described as oral journalism,” the award citation noted. “Ingrid Griffith has attracted critical attention as an important voice in the telling of the Guyanese story."

In Spring 2014, Griffith played the lead character in the Communication and Theatre Department's Black Box Theater production of “Ruined” by Lynn Nottage. A member of Times Square Playwrights and the American Renaissance Theatre Company, as well as a regularly published columnist on health and fitness and popular culture topics, Griffith has won the Research Mentoring Award from John Jay for four years in a row.

Click here for more information on Demerara Gold and upcoming performance dates.