ABOUT
As a performer, Shona is an original cast member of the Broadway productions To Kill a Mockingbird with Jeff Daniels and Death of a Salesman with Wendell Pierce. She started 2022 reprising her role in To Kill a Mockingbird. Her television and film work includes The Hating Game (Dir. Peter Hutchings), Linoleum (with Jim Gaffagan), Preaching to the Choir: On the One (Dir. Charles Randolf-Wright), Lights Out, Third Watch, New York Undercover, Law & Order, One Life to Live, and Trinity. Previous performances include: Yale Repertory Theatre's Mary Jane by award-winning playwright Amy Herzog and Eclipsed by Danai Gurira at Yale Repertory Theatre, John Cariani’s Almost, Maine and Love/Sick with Half Moon Theatre Company. Her Off Broadway credits include: New York Theater Workshop, Lincoln Center Directors' Lab, The Public Theater, Circle in the Square, Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Theatre Club, and La MaMa, e.t.c. She has worked at numerous regional theaters, including three years as a company member at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Yale Repertory Theatre, Williamstown Theater Festival, Actors Theater of Louisville, Stageworks/Hudson, Arena Stage, The Acting Company, Hartford Stage and American Conservatory Theater. Her television and film credits include: FOX television series, “Lights Out”, WALK THE FISH directed by Kathleen Man, “Preaching to the Choir: On the One” directed by Charles Randolph-Wright, Third Watch , New York Undercover , Law and Order , One Life to Live, and Trinity. She is a Fulbright Scholar, an Audelco Award winner, A Schomburg Fellow, Usual Suspect with New York Theatre Workshop.
Shona Tucker is an award-winning actress, writer, director, activist, and educator. She has graced professional stages throughout the US and in several countries for over 30 years. ​She is a passionate scholar and practitioner who uses her energy and vast experience to tell vibrant stories and assist others in telling their own to better illuminate the human condition. Among her other hobbies, she enjoys singing with Souls United of the Hudson Valley and working as a founding member of OnPar.
As a director, Shona has worked on productions in academia and in the professional arena. Professional theater companies she has worked with include: Arena Stage, The Acting Company, The Lamb’s Theater, The National Black Theater Festival, Intar, The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, The Blue Heron Theater, and The Producer’s Club. In academia Ms. Tucker has directed at the University of Louisville, NYU Graduate Acting Program, Vassar College, University of Evansville, Ramapo College of New Jersey, and Philipstown Depot Theater.
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As a writer, Ms. Tucker has completed Mississippi Mud, a trilogy based on true stories of three “regular” African American women whose major life choices transform their families’ histories. The second installment of the trilogy, Growing Wild, was featured in the #HealMeToo Festival at IRT Theater in 2019, and an excerpt was published in The Good River Review (Spaulding College, Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing). She is currently completing a pilot with the working title What Had Happened Was… and has co-authored a chapter in Community-Engaged Praxis in Peace, Social Justice, and Human Rights Education: Partnering for Transformative Change (Teachers College Press, Spring 2026). She has had the support and interest from New York Theater Workshop, New York Stage and Film, Emerson College, Ramapo College, Liberation Theater Company, and Half Moon Theater as she developed this work.
Shona earned a BS from Northwestern University and MFA in Acting at NYU/Tisch School of the Arts. She is the former Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Louisville. She is a Full Professor and Mary Riepma Ross Chair at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.