She received at least two Oderco Awards from the Audience Development Commission for Black Theater and Artists in 2019. Lloyd Richards Directors Award Named after the Tony Award-winning director of many August Wilson plays from the National Black Theater Festival in Winston Salem, North Carolina.
Shauneille Gantt Perry was born on July 26, 1929 in Chicago. Her father, Graham, was one of the first Assistant Black Attorneys in Illinois. Her mother, Par (Gantt) Perry, was a reporter for Chicago’s pioneering black court. Lorraine Hansbury, who wrote “The Hay of the Sun,” was one of Shonille’s cousins.
While attending Howard University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in drama in 1950, Perry Rider became a Howard player in a student theater group who played Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” and Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” on a Scandinavian tour. I belonged to it. At the invitation of the Norwegian government. “We were the only black company touring these wonderful countries,” she told a record in Hackensack, NJ in 1971.
She earned a Master of Arts degree from the Goodman Drama School at the Art Institute of Chicago (now part of DePaul University) in 1952. She studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London as a Fulbright scholar in 1954. However, because she was dissatisfied with her curriculum (she said, “they were always doing’Cleopatra’), she transferred to the London Academy of Music and Drama Arts.
Back in Chicago, she started acting — she was in the summer stockplay “Daughters of Mamba” with Ethel Waters — also writing for the black newspaper The Chicago Defender. She met writer Richard Wright in 1959 while she was traveling to Paris, where she won the Evony essay contest. She asked, “Are they still back in America and lynching people?”
“I remember telling him a little differently today,” she told the Times in 1971. But the next day, she read about a black man who was accused of rape and forced into a cell. His body was later found floating in the river. “I was wondering about myself,” she said, “what does that person say about my analysis of things?”