
“When stories die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.”
Sue Monk Kidd
Sue Monk Kidd
DIRECTOR • CONSULTANT • PLAYWRIGHT • POET • ACTOR • CULTURAL WORKER
"Someone once told me I'd have to pick something... so I picked everything."
With almost 10 years in the industry under their belt, DAVID H. PARKER (they/them) is a Barbara Whitman award-nominated and award-winning artist from Birmingham, AL, a blue island in the US South’s sea of red. Intersectionality informs the base of their work, but the intersection of Blackness and Queerness is always at the top of their priorities, often including HIV and its subsequent stigmas, gender, and the social tensions created through the lenses of Southern identity and cultural landscapes.
David has worked on and Off-Broadway; was a recipient of the inaugural Cody Renard Richard Scholarship; invited to the inaugural GLAAD Black Queer Creative Summit; invited as a cultural organizer to the Highlander Research and Education Center where the likes of Rosa Parks and Angela Davis trained; is Co-Artistic Director of the Birmingham Black Repertory Theatre Collective; and is the SDCF Shadow Director to Keenan Tyler Oliphant on HADESTOWN on Broadway.
David holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). They have worked as a Teaching Associate at UCLA as well as guest teaching artist engagements with the University of Oregon and University of Alabama at Birmingham's Arts in Medicine.
As a Type-A Virgo whose only real claim to fame is how they once won a beautiful baby contest... they need a surprising number of naps.
Photographed by LaQuann Dawson
Forbes, Teen Vogue, and The Grio on the Black Queer Creative Summit
written, directed, & produced by David H. Parker
co-produced by Carlton V. Bell II
key art by Khalif J. Gillett
January - July 2024: Rogue Machine Theater's Inaugural Playwright's Roundtable brought together early to mid-career playwrights, some of whom are returning to theater after finding success in film and television, to write new plays from scratch.
July 2024: FREAKZSHOW's first public reading.
September - November 2024: Fall Workshop Intensive produced by The Workshop Theater. Facilitated by Roger Q. Mason & Avi Klipfel; slated for 2025 at The Tank by producer Carlton V Bell II.
Made in collaboration with hundreds of community co-creators, Los Angeles became the stage for this new theatrical event created to hold the beautiful complexities of the city.
Directed by David H. Parker & Zhailon Levingston
See what the New York Times calls “a hilarious yet profound tragedy smothered in comedy,” in this Pulitzer Prize–winning take on Hamlet by James Ijames, direct from Broadway to Los Angeles.
Original Direction by Saheem Ali
Director: Sideeq Heard
Associate Director: David H. Parker
Starring: Nikki Crawford, Chris Herbie Holland, Billy Eugene Jones, Adrianna Mitchell, Marcel Spears, Benja Kay Thomas, and Matthew Elijah Webb
MFA THESIS ... 8 SOLD OUT SHOWS! I directed the Pulitzer Prize-Winning play by Jackie Sibblies Drury in its Los Angeles debut as my MFA Thesis at UCLA. Our concept interrogated surveillance of Black communities using a middle class family as the lens through which perpetration often occurs. The production utilized live cameras, sourced visual material, as well as cinematically pre-filmed footage to set the stage for the audience and unceremoniously disrupt it.
Don't believe me? Let's ask the audience!
"For a piece I saw twice in NYC--the original at SoHo Rep, and then the remount at Theatre for a New Audience--to still rock me to the core for the third time, all these years later at UCLA is truly something to celebrate... [David's] production and every single human a part of it doing magical, spellbinding work with [Jackie Sibblies Drury]'s masterpiece. Nothing short of amazing and important." -- LARRY POWELL
"[The production] made me want to keep making art and loving life." -- XAVIER BROWN
Tell Me I’m Gorgeous..., a 2022 Yale Drama Series Finalist and 2-time Eugene O'Neill Conference Finalist, is about the (sometimes literal) earth-moving influence that Black and brown Queer people have when they try to exist in white spaces not only unintended for them, but in which they are rendered completely invisible.
Written by Aaron Coleman
Directed by David H. Parker
A sports-inspired fantasia, Patience is a meditation on Black excellence, next chapters, and playing a very long game alone. This Off-Broadway world premiere was produced by 2nd Stage.
Written by Johnny G. Lloyd
Director: Zhailon Levingston
Associate Director: David H. Parker
Starring: Justiin A. Davis, Jonathan Burke, Nemuna Ceesay, Zainab Barry, and Mary E. Hodges
Is Anybody Out There? is a premiere virtual dance opera that explores a new medium combining traditional theatre and experimental film while its characters grappled head on with isolation, sexual expression, and their own morality.
Produced by Birmingham Black Repertory Theatre Collective
Written by Carlton V Bell II
Directed by David H. Parker
Edited and scored by Aija Penix
L-R: Benja Kay Thomas, Adrianna Mitchell, Billy Eugene Jones, Matthew Elijah Webb, Chris Herbie Holland, Marcel Spears and Nikki Crawford in "Fat Ham" at Geffen Playhouse. Associate Director: David H. Parker. Photo by Jeff Lorch.
DIRECTING / PRODUCING RESUME
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