User:Rickerby/sandbox

Among the most influential playwrights of a generation, Rickerby Hinds skillfully challenges conventional notions of the stage while respecting its history and tradition. A native of Honduras, who immigrated to South Central Los Angeles at age 13, Hinds is driven to opening theater to diverse voices, experiences and new audiences. Hinds’ Daze to Come changed the dramatic arts forever when it debuted in 1989. The first ever full-length play to use the founding elements of hip hop as the primary language of the stage, Daze introduced the genre of hip hop theater to the world. Self-marketed and self-produced, its story of a rap community forced into exile was both raw and inspiring. Daze To Come and Hinds’ subsequent works have empowered an entire school of young playwrights to speak to the world in the language of hip hop.

Hinds was twice awarded the Audrey Skirball-Kenis Award for best play while an MFA student at UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television. Blackballin' (read at London's Royal Court Theatre) examines the issue of race and history in American sports and society. The semi-autobiographical Birthmark (commissioned by Showtime to be adapted into a screenplay) explores the social and cultural conflicts of a Spanish-speaking immigrant of African-descent forced to choose between the limiting racial categories offered within American society. In One Size Fits All, Hinds tackles the global issue of the exploitation of children by tracing the life of an athletic sneaker from its creation in an Indonesian sweatshop, to the ghettos of America, to the sugar cane fields of the Dominican Republic, and finally to the feet of a child soldier in Eastern Europe.

In his play Straight From Tha Underground, the issue of freedom is chronicled as a B-Boy from Compton is mystically transported back to 1863. Played in university theaters, churches, community centers, and conferences, Underground highlights Hinds' ability to craft stories and dialogue that impact audiences across racial, educational, economic and generational lines. In Keep Hedz Ringin' Hinds makes the ultimate connection between tradition and innovation-demonstrating that hip hop cultural expression, like grand opera, has the ability to elevate both its practitioners and its audiences to unprecedented heights of human understanding.

Currently a tenured Associate Professor of Playwriting in the Department of Theater at the University of California, Riverside and the creator and director of the Califest Hip Hop Theater Festival, Hinds has also taught at the University of Cincinnati and the University of Redlands. Among the entities that have supported his works in the form of commissions, grants, and fellowships are; the Ford Foundation, the Showtime Television Network, the GeVa Theatre in New York, the Mark Taper Forum, the Cornerstone Theatre, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The New LATC (Los Angeles Theater Center). Institutions such as Stanford University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, the University of Houston, Howard University and the University of Aarhus, Denmark are just some of the entities that have hosted Hinds.