About Courtney:

Courtney Bailey, Ph.D., is a St. Louis-based writer and theatre artist. The Riverfront Times named her the 2023 Best St. Louis Playwright, and her play Brontë Sister House Party earned the 2022 St. Louis Theatre Circle Award for Best New Play. As a playwright and teacher, she prioritizes creating art with incarcerated artists and returning citizens. She's been privileged to work with the support of organizations such as the Folger Shakespeare Library (2024 Artistic Research Fellow), St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, The Bechdel Project, the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis, Prison Performing Arts, Slightly Askew Theatre Ensemble (SATE), and Equally Represented Arts (ERA).

Her artistic priorities as a theatre artist, specifically, consist of queer representation, responsible storytelling across cultures and identities, and the consistently hard work of blurring the lines between writer and performer. And as a queer woman writer across multiple mediums—including plays, fiction, and literary criticism—whose interests span gender(ed) representation, religious deconstruction, and intersectional feminism, she has a diverse publication and production record.  

Her academic book, Spectrums of Shakespearean Crossdressing: The Art of Performing Women (Routledge, 2019) considers the wide spectrum of theatrical crossdressing for women’s roles in Shakespearean drama, from passing to drag. As a playwright, she has been a fellow with St. Louis Shakespeare Festival’s Confluence Writers Project, which commissioned her full-length play Brontë Sister House Party. Recently, her plays Everything I eat in a day: a shameless corona play (St. Louis Shakespeare Festival) and Tonya and the Totes in Subterrastrata (SATE) were produced digitally during the pandemic. In the summer of 2019, her full-length play, Immersion Play, premiered in a workshop production in New York City at The Connelly Theater with She NYC Arts, an Off-Broadway theatre festival celebrating women writers (Dir. Sandy Doria). And in August 2022, Brontë Sister House Party had its first full production with SATE in St. Louis. She is currently a FIFE Fellow with the Bechdel Project (Brooklyn, NY).

She earned her Ph.D. in English Literature from Baylor University in 2016, with a focus on Renaissance Drama, the plays of William Shakespeare, and performance studies. She completed her dissertation under the mentorship of Dr. Maurice Hunt. She also holds an MA in English from Baylor and a BA in English from Mercer University. While a graduate student at Baylor, she won all major grad student teaching awards and honors, including the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, the Charles G. Smith Outstanding Graduate Student of the Year Award, the Christine Fall Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, and the Donald and Judy Schmeltekopf Fellowship for Educational Leadership. She is an alum of the renowned SITI Company Summer Intensive (2018), where she trained in Viewpoints and Suzuki Method with SITI Company members. The 2018 intensive culminated with a workshop performance of THE BACCHAE, led by SITI’s Anne Bogart.

A proud member of the St. Louis theatre community, she has been privileged to work with companies like the New Jewish Theatre (District Merchants), St. Louis Shakespeare Festival (Othello), the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis (Imaginary Theatre Co.), Slightly Askew Theatre Ensemble (Doctor Faustus; Of Mice and Men; Aphra Behn Festival 2020 & 2021), Mustard Seed Theatre (The Last Days of Judas Iscariot), and Theatre Nuevo (Fefu and her Friends). In an interview for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, local actor-director Jacqueline Thompson describes Courtney as “a rising star and someone to watch.”

She works full-time as a writer, teaching artist, and performer, after previously working as an Assistant Professor of English and Theatre Studies at Greenville University. As a professor, she taught courses in storytelling, theatre history, Shakespeare, British literature, writing, performance studies, and dramatic literature. At GU, she was awarded the Archer Award for Distinguished Faculty Scholarship in 2018. Her academic and popular writing has also appeared in HowlRound, Cahiers Elisabethains, ANQ, Praxis, Literature and Belief, and Mississippi Quarterly.

She also writes regularly on her Substack, Letters from the Homestead.