Lenelle Moïse is a playwright, screenwriter, and poet. Fueled by a radical optimism, her artistic influences include bebop, hip-hop, nature-based spirituality, queer liberation, and memory. Lenelle wrote the romantic comedy K-I-S-S-I-N-G, winner of the 2023 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding New Script, a national finalist for the 2024 Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award, and an international finalist for the 2024 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.
Lenelle wrote, composed, and co-starred in the Off-Broadway play EXPATRIATE, a two-woman show about platonic soulmates in Paris. After workshops at Hedgebrook, Southern Rep, and the New Black Fest at the Lark, her Black feminist sex comedy MERIT won The Ruby Prize. As a screenwriter, Lenelle contributed to the HBO Max hybrid documentary Eyes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground. Her work appears in many anthologies, including The Kilroys List: Volume Two; Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience; and Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution. She is also published in American Theatre, POETRY Magazine, Mosaic, Meridians, Torch, Women and Performance, and No Tokens.
Lenelle is an accomplished solo performer and has been a guest artist at dozens of colleges and venues, including Poets House, Lincoln Center, the Norton Museum of Art, and the United Nations (as part of the star-studded "Breaking the Silence, Beating the Drum" concert). Her poetry collection, HAITI GLASS (City Lights Books), won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award. Hailed, "A Renaissance woman in the arts," she is currently developing a new dramatic song cycle inspired by her Afro-Caribbean roots.
