Jillian is an award-winning playwright, dramaturg and cultural leader with a passion for creating seismic cultural shifts. Her theatrical work bends genre and ruminates on “non-traditional” themes to deliberately disrupt the status quo and dig for a path to collective liberation. Named “one of New York City’s most exciting playwrights” by the Bushwick Starr in 2016, her play, SKiNFOLK: AN AMERICAN SHOW, appeared in 2017 ANT Fest (aka All New Talent Festival) at Ars Nova.

Her first play SARAH’S SALT. is the winner of the Columbia@Roundabout Reading Series at Roundabout Theatre Company and was chosen from over 1,000 submissions as a 2017 Relentless Award Honorable Mention.

Offstage, Jillian has worked with organizations such as the Brooklyn artspace JACK helping to facilitate their year-long series ‘Reparations365,’ the New England Literature Program, where she taught transcendental literature, poetry and Shakespeare, and the Columbia School of the Arts, where she created and facilitated self-care workshops for fellow graduate students and earned her MFA in Dramaturgy.

Jillian is the recipient of the 2017-18 UMS Education and Community Engagement Research Residency to develop her new play, TIGNON, at The University of Michigan and is Associate Curator of the 2017-2018 Starr Reading Series at the Bushwick Starr.

In addition to developing TIGNON this year, Jillian is also dramaturg on the new play, Thoughts of a Colored Man… directed by Taye Diggs.