Cheryl Davis

Cheryl received the Ed Kleban Award for her work as a musical theater librettist, and her musical Barnstormer, written with award-winning composer Douglas J. Cohen, received a Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation Award under the auspices of the Lark Play Development Center. Her play Maid’s Door was produced at the Billie Holiday Theatre to excellent reviews, received seven Audelco Awards, and was presented at the 2015 and 2017 National Black Theatre Festivals; it was also a finalist for the Francesca Primus Prize. Her musical Bridges was commissioned and produced by the Berkeley Playhouse and received great reviews, including from the San Francisco Examiner; it received a series of readings in New York in November 2018 as part of Amas Musical Theatre’s “Dare to Be Different Festival”. She co-wrote the book for the 92nd Street Y’s Lyrics & Lyricists presentation, Irving Berlin: American, and is currently co-librettist on the Canadian-based Volcano Theatre Company’s adaptation of Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha, which is scheduled to receive its premiere in 2021.
Cheryl’s play about the desegregation of the nation’s school system, The Color of Justice, which was commissioned by Theatreworks/USA, received excellent reviews in the New York Times and Daily News, and tours regularly. Her play Winnie the Pooh KIDS was commissioned and is currently licensed by the Disney Theatrical Group. Her play Cover Girls, which is an adaptation of the Bishop T. D. Jakes novel, was produced and toured by ClearChannel Entertainment. She has written commissions for the Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science and Technology Project, the Red Mountain Theatre Company (Mandela and The MLK Project), and the Birmingham Children’s Theatre (Tuxedo Junction, about Alabama Jazz musician Erskine Hawkins). Her work has been read and performed internationally, including at the Cleveland Play House, the Kennedy Center, and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Cheryl is a musical theater librettist and lyricist and is an alumna of the Advanced Workshop of the BMI/Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop.
Cheryl received a Writers’ Guild Award for her work on the daytime dramatic serial As the World Turns and was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award for her work on that show as well. She is currently writing for Law & Order: SVU on a freelance basis, and her episode “Garland’s Baptism by Fire” aired on April 2, 2020. Her play Swimming Uptown has received developmental readings at the Lark Play Development Center, the Abingdon Theatre, and the Classical Theater of Harlem; the TV pilot based on that play was a featured script in the New York TV Festival in 2017. She was the sole script writer for the health-related radio drama, Staying Well in Camberwell, and was one of the writing team for the web soap opera Our World.
She has a degree in English and a Certificate in Theatre and Dance from Princeton University, and has studied playwriting with Jean-Claude Van Itallie and Jeffrey Sweet. She is a former Dramatists Guild Fellow, having been mentored by playwright/librettist Alfred Uhry. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild and a Board member of the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund. She is a member of Honor Roll! an advocacy and action group of women+ playwrights over 40 as well as our women+ over 40 allies. She received her J.D. from Columbia University School of Law and her M.S.J. from the Columbia University School of Journalism. She is a practicing attorney in Manhattan and is the General Counsel for the Authors Guild.