Award-Winning Actor Akeem Davis Joins Bi-Co Theater Program

Award-winning actor, director, and educator joins the Bi-Co Theater Program as a guest lecturer and director for the fall 2021 semester, teaching Fundamentals of Acting and Performance Ensembles and Advanced Performance Ensembles. Under Davis' direction, students in the ensembles courses will explore and perform Gruesome Playground Injuries by Rajiv Joseph, the fast-paced, intense story of Kayleen and Doug, two characters whose intertwined histories and romantic tension play out over scenes that span different ages in their lives. Auditions for the play are open to all Bi-Co students. In spring 2021, Davis offered The Actor as Authority workshop, an amalgam of discussions on the actor's method and practical explorations of monologue and group scene work, as part of the Theater Program's Groundwork project. He notes, "The objective of the workshop was to empower and challenge actors to own the responsibility of harvesting their intellectual, physical and emotional histories—their essential gardens—as primary sources in realizing powerfully personal performances."

Davis has received a Barrymore Award for Outstanding Supporting Performance in a Play, seven Barrymore Award nominations, a Helen Hayes nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Play, and the 2015 F. Otto Haas Award for an Emerging Philadelphia Theater Artist. Davis and his wife and fellow actor Taysha Canales were both part of the Wilma’s audio production of , a shift from a staged play due to the pandemic. When a scheduled Arden Theater role in A Streetcar Named Desire was postponed due to the pandemic, Davis pivoted to appear in Lantern Theater’s virtual play reading of Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona. Davis' additional roles at the Arden include Tiny Beautiful Things (a stage version of Cheryl Strayed's bestselling book), Ibsen's A Doll’s House (Barrymore Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor), and August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean. He has also performed at People’s Light and Theater, Theater Horizon, InterAct Theater, Theater Exile, and the Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival. Davis, who is from Miami, is a graduate of Florida State University and a man of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc.

About the Theater Program

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