She has won at least two Audelco Awards from the Audience Development Commission, which honor Black theaters and artists, and in 2019 received the award. Director Lloyd Richards . Award from the National Black Theater Festival, in Winston-Salem, NC, named after the Tony Award-winning director of several August Wilson plays.
Shauneille Gantt Perry was born on July 26, 1929 in Chicago. Her father, Graham, was one of the first black assistant attorney generals in Illinois; Her mother, Pearl (Gantt) Perry, was a pioneering reporter for the Black court in Chicago. Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote “A Raisin the Sun,” was one of Shauneille’s cousins.
While attending Howard University – where she received her bachelor’s degree in drama in 1950 – Perry Ryder of the student theater group, the Howard Players, performed Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” and Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” during the tour. toured Scandinavia at the invitation of the Norwegian government. She told The Record of Hackensack, NJ, in 1971: “We were the only Black company to tour those wondrous countries.
She earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in 1952 from the Goodman School of Drama at the Art Institute of Chicago (now part of DePaul University). As a Fulbright Scholar in 1954, she studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. However, unsatisfied with the curriculum (“they always study “Cleopatra,” she says), she transferred to the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art.
Back in Chicago, she started acting—she starred in a summer historical play, “Mamba’s Girls,” with Ethel Waters—and also wrote for the black newspaper The Chicago Defender. In 1959, during a trip to Paris where she won an essay contest in Ebony, she met author Richard Wright, who, she recalls, asked her, “Are they still holding on? everyone back to the United States?”
“I remember telling him ‘They do it a little differently there today'” she told The Times in 1971. But the next day, she read about a Black man accused of rape and forced into a cell; His body was later found floating in the river. “I keep asking myself,” she said, ““What is that man saying about my analysis of things? “”
