The Vinnette Carroll Award honoring an individual, theater, or organization for significant achievement in advancing the cause of diversity, equality, and inclusion in South Florida theater.
This new Carbonell Special Award is named after the legendary playwright, actress, and theater director who was the first African-American woman to direct on Broadway and the first to receive a Tony Award nomination for directing, before moving to South Florida in the 1980s where she founded the Vinnette Carroll Repertory Company.
2024: John Pryor
Director and actor John Pryor has been a valued theater professor at Miami-Dade Community College and Florida Memorial College who taught hundreds of students the joys of theater while exposing them to playwrights such as August Wilson, Charles Fuller, Lorraine Hansberry, Samm Art-Williams, and Vinnette Carroll. Pryor not only produced Carroll’s Don’t Bother Me I Can’t Cope for Miami-Dade Community College, he also served as her stage manager when she produced and directed her musical Your Arms Too Short to Box with God starring Patti Labelle in a brief Miami run. Pryor has directed more than 100 productions over the last 34 years and has appeared in many as an actor. He also directed M Ensemble’s production of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson’s complete, 10-play Century Cycle.
2023: Christina Alexander & Katie Christie
Through their work with Voices United, a non-profit organization designed to promote social justice through the arts while nourishing and connecting warriors of change locally, nationally and around the world, Christina Alexander and Katie Christie have officially led the South Florida Theatre League’s AntiRacism Theatre Strategies Cohorts, in which over a dozen local theatres have participated—City Theatre, Juggerknot Theatre Company, Lost Girls Theatre, Miami New Drama, Theatre Lab, and Zoetic Stage. In these cohorts, participants worked on skill-building, alliance-building, issue framing, messaging, systems analysis, coaching, and cultivating solutions.
2022: Marshall L. Davis
The inaugural winner of this award, Marshall L. Davis has served for nearly 40 years as managing director of the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center (AHCAC) in Miami’s Liberty City, where artists such as Oscar winner/playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater artistic director Robert Battle got their start. A former drama teacher, Davis created a multi-arts curriculum and programming to nurture thousands of arts students, many of whom have gone on to study in arts magnet programs or received scholarships to study at top arts institutions such as the Juilliard School. Adding an art gallery and black box theater to the AHCAC campus, Davis has helped make a creative home for young artists, companies and audiences.
