JOY NESBITT
WRITER
stage
Blood of my Blood
(Formerly titled: Good)
Productions:
2026 - Royal Court Theatre
Verity Bargate Award Longlist
Soho Theatre - London, UK
Theatre503 International Playwriting Award Longlist
Theatre503 - London, UK
Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting Longlist
Royal Exchange Theatre - London, UK
Bullock Creek, SC. 1862. Ginnie is an enslaved woman enwrapped in a 10 year relationship with her captor, Doc. Navigating oppression of plantation life with 5 children, Ginnie attempts to conduct a romantic relationship with Doc as the civil war rages around the plantation. On the eve of emancipation, she must make a decision: to stay with her captor or free herself. Based on the true family history of the playwright, Good explores freedom, coercion, and ways in which Black women have had to navigate misogynoir throughout history.
This play will premiere in the Upstairs of the Royal Court Theatre in London, UK, as part of their 70th Anniversary Season in 2026.
This piece was written and performed for the Rachel Baptiste Programme at Smock Alley Theatre. A reading was directed by Annie Ryan at Smock Alley Theatre.
KÄTZCHEN
Productions:
2026 - Riverside Studios
Bitesize Festival Best Writing Award 2026
Riverside Studios - London, UK
KÄTZCHEN is an afro-surrealist one-woman show unravelling the coming-of-age story of the black feminine. Beamed down from the stars and into a world governed by "Nature’s Law", Daphne is an alien in a dress. She is here to learn what it means to be human, but the humans she encounters - a cynical policeman, a weary lover, a violent butcher - only teach her the languages of possession, race, gender, and power.
She is told to smile, but not too much. She is told to act "classy," even when it hurts. She is told that to be a woman is to exist within a "consciousness of the oppressed." She is told that she has an “exotic blackness”...Whatever that means. As she moves from the neon haze of a nightclub to the dim warmth of a shared apartment, Daphne realises that human communication is less about understanding and more about survival.
This play premiered as GAPTOOTH Collective's first production as part of the Bitesize Festival at Riverside Studios in London, UK.
"One of the biggest strengths of this black coming-of-age play is the viewpoint through the eyes of an innocent. The audience isn't being slammed with didactic messages about race and feminism. Instead, we get the powerful points that are made, but with intelligence, humour and grace."
BroadwayWorld
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Stilt
Productions:
2025 - Corrib Theatre
"What is truly impressive about this play is how Nesbitt and Griffith adeptly walk a fine line, depicting a deeply unsettling scenario without ever, in my view – and others may feel differently – crossing a line into gratuitously sickening scenes."
Oregon Artswatch
"This brave play brilliantly takes on the seemingly impossible task of uncovering the implicit misogyny in an old tale, while showing how it’s connected to the ugly narratives that are being spun today."
Oregon Artswatch
"Joy Nesbitt's STILT, now making its world premiere at Corrib Theatre under Holly Griffith's direction, takes that primal anxiety about identity and weaves it into something both mythic and unnervingly contemporary."
BroadwayWorld
"Nesbitt leans into that moral murkiness brilliantly, bringing it into the current context of far-right ideology. [...] This play is brilliantly written – intricately woven, if you'll pardon the pun. It's intellectually complex but also operates on a raw emotional level that gets under your skin and stays there. The tonal range is remarkable, moving from genuine tenderness to moments that are legitimately frightening, and the cast navigates these shifts with skill and precision."
BroadwayWorld
Stilt is a thriller that reimagines the Rumpelstiltskin myth as a modern Irish cautionary tale.
TJ is obsessed with uncovering his true birth name, which was lost when he was adopted as a child. His fixation with the Rumpelstiltskin fairytale leads him down a dark path, fueled by political extremism.
At its core, Stilt explores the power of names and how the loss or reclamation of one’s true identity affects selfhood. The play's themes are deeply intertwined with contemporary Irish life, reflecting the tension between the country’s historical and cultural legacies and the modern issues it faces.
This play was commissioned by Corrib Theatre in Portland, OR, for their 2025 season.
Scenes with Black Folk
(formerly titled: Meditations on Somebodiness)
Productions:
2025 - Camden Peoples Theatre, Camden Fringe
An afrosurrealist play about what it means to be in the process of identity-making as a Black person in America (and any other place).
Premiered at the Camden Fringe Festival 2025. Previously workshopped at the BIPOC Early Career Theater-makers Program at The Williamstown Theater Festival 2021, Workshopped in 2022 (The Lir Academy), 2024 (Irish Theatre Institute), and 2025 (Riverside Studios R&D).
Off West End Theatre Award Nominated
Camden Fringe Festival - London, UK
"A beautiful, uncomfortable and confronting cabaret on the uniquely human experience of blackness [...] Scenes with Black Folk is a unique, obscure and inspired piece of work that just can’t be missed if you get the chance. "
The Obscurity
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
"In a theatrical environment that is too often afraid to ask deep questions of race, preferring instead to just agree that “things are very bad”, Scenes With Black Folk offers a nuanced and complex study of modern black Britain from a Gen Z lens."
The Reviews Hub
JULIUS CAESAR VARIETY SHOW
Productions:
2024 - Dublin, The New Theatre
2026 - Summerhall Arts, Edinburgh Fringe Festival
Fishamble New Writing Award Shortlist
Fishamble - Dublin, Ireland
Radical Spirit Award Shortlist
Project Arts Centre - Dublin, Ireland
Solas Nua New Voices Award Shortlist
Solas Nua - Washington, D.C.
"A messy, truthful, boundary pushing piece of new writing you won't want to miss."
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
EDFest Magazine,
"Joy Nesbitt’s new play is a candid, funny and deeply discomforting success exploring artistic prejudice in theatre. "
The Skinny, "The Best Theatre at Edinburgh Fringe 2026"
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
"A masterclass [...] the play successfully nails powerful people. "
The Scotsman
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
"Nesbitt's play is dark, ambitious, and deliberately uncomfortable. It manages to bring a broad range of concerns together, opening a timely conversation at a time of rising far-right politics."
The Herald Scotland
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
"When we watch a black actor (a nicely wary Loré Adewusi) being perceived by a white director only through demands of representativeness, as able only to play roles warped by violence, it opens up questions about an industry that produces only plays with majority white casts. Can we say this is fiction?"
The Irish Times
"Most driven was Joy Nesbitt's dark comedy JULIUS CAESAR VARIETY SHOW [...] Nesbitt's points felt new and insightful, as a black actor (a cool-headed Loré Adewusi) was seen dealing with a white bullying director (a compellingly snide Ultan Pringle) who insisted on the one hand that colour-blind casting doesn't work, because audiences can't unsee race, and on the other hand that not going along with exploitative expectations of blackness is actually being artistically conservative. How depressingly elaborate these schemes are."
The Irish Times, "The Best Theatre of 2024"
A Black actor, a Woman actor, and a Straight White Male actor walk into a Shakespeare audition. What could go wrong?
Three actors from diverse backgrounds audition for a role in Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. Amidst a riot outside the theatre, they face an intensely respected director who is determined to reinvent the play through “unorthodox” methods, often at the expense of the actors' personal integrity. The audition becomes a battleground where the actors' identities are scrutinized, with an accompanist intensifying the director’s demands. As they navigate the director’s expectations, the actors grapple with how their identities alter the meaning of a play and the role that diversity and inclusion plays in reshaping the theatre industry.
Dear Rosa
Productions:
2024 - Cork, Cork Midsummer
2026 - London, The Barbican Centre
"In Joy Nesbitt's Dear Rosa, an anxious young Black woman (Tishé Fatunbi) addresses you as if she is speaking to an imagined Rosa Parks, apologising for not calling out the countless microaggressions she encounters, and deftly demonstrating the personal cost of shameful, enduring racism. "
Financial Times
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
"Memorable and profound [...] Joy Nesbitt's Dear Rosa, which achieves the most in the limited time, has Tishé Fatunbi's confused young woman address you, the viewer, as Rosa Parks. "
The Stage
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
"Nesbitt’s snappily sharp script, like Morgan Parker’s poetry, navigating the personal and political life of the modern black woman with insight and ease."
The Arts Review
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
"the writing and the playing are themselves so clever and so committed"
The Irish Times
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
A young Black Irish woman writes letters to Rosa Parks to apologise for being a "Bad Black," but as she writes more letters, she finds that her silence in the face of microaggressions is worse than speaking up.
Part confessional, part peep-show booth, and completely visceral, 12 short 5-minute plays were performed by one actor for one audience member at a time in a purpose-built booth as part of Cork Midsummer Festival 2024.
Theatre for One: This Ireland featured the six original writers from the 2019 presentation at Cork Midsummer Festival (Marina Carr, Stacey Gregg, Emmet Kirwan, Louise Lowe, Mark O’Rowe and Enda Walsh), working with an electric line-up of new writers (Iseult Deane, Susannah Al Fraihat, Aoibhéann McCann, Joy Nesbitt, Ois O’Donoghue and Aoife Delany Reade), whose short plays were selected from a nationwide public call-out.
One booth, 12 voices and a uniquely intimate experience for every single audience member.
Barbie, Girl
Productions:
2022 - Williamstown, MA, Williamstown Theater Festival
Short play performed as part of a collaboration between The Williamstown Theater Festival 2022 and the Williams College Museum of Art entitled Working in Desire: The Political Economy of Black Feminine Labor.
This piece was directed by Veshonte Brown and performed by Jessica Caputo. View the performance here. (Starting at 10:07)
Speed Dating
Productions:
2020 - Harvard University, Black Playwrights Festival
Short play about online speed dating workshopped at the Harvard Black Playwrights Festival 2021.
Call, Response, and Go-Go Live: Making a Musical Movement for Black Lives in Washington, D.C. in 2020
2020
Honors joint thesis written in the departments of Anthropology and Music at Harvard University. The thesis documents the work of the Washington, D.C. organization “Long Live GoGo” in the summer and fall of 2020. An engaged scholarly project with rich theoretical dimensions, it highlights Go-Go’s recurring role in resisting antiBlackness and the organization’s grassroots techniques for generating political momentum and strategy.