Kelley Nicole Girod

Kelley Nicole Girod is a playwright and producer currently residing in NYC where, for the past 16 years she has dedicated herself to the curation and development of work by Black playwrights as well as building community.  She is currently Director of New Work at the world famous Apollo Theater in Harlem, NYC, and founded the OBIE Award winning Black playwrights festival, The Fire This Time Festival, which is entering its 17th season  and has premiered and developed nearly 100 new plays by playwrights of the Black diaspora. Kelley was recently named a Top 30 Professional 2025 by Musical America.  In 2023, she was named the recipient of New York Innovative Theater’s prestigious Ellen Stewart Award in recognition of her contribution to the theater. In addition, Girod is Editor of The Fire This Time Festival’s first anthology of plays published with Bloomsbury UK/Methuen Drama titled “25 Plays from The Fire This Time Festival, A Decade of Recognition, Resistance, Rebirth and Black Theater.” She has also been a guest lecturer at Yale and Stanford University.

As a playwright, her work reflects the rich communities of her native Louisiana, and in particular, the often overlooked stories of the Black/Creole/Cajun experience that she was brought up in.  For nearly a decade Kelley has worked on a trilogy of plays highlighting this unique experience, weaving together stories inspired by her family to uplift languages, traditions, and ways of life currently under threat due to climate change. The plays in the trilogy consist of This Stretch of Montpelier, The Faith Healer, and A Body of Water.

She received her MFA in playwriting from Columbia University where she was a Stein and Liberace Fellow as well as a John Golden Fellow. She received her undergrad degree at LSU where she graduated with honors.