Monica Ndounou

Dr. Monica White Ndounou is an Associate Professor of Theater at Dartmouth College and affiliate faculty in Film and Media Studies and African and African American Studies. She is the Founder and President of The CRAFT Institute and The International Black Theatre Summit. Dr. Ndounou serves on the Advisory Committee of the American Theatre Wing. She previously served as President of the Black Theatre Association (BTA) from 2016 to 2018 and as Vice President of Advocacy for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) from 2019 to 2021. She also served on the board of The August Wilson Society and on The Black Seed’s founding National Advisory Committee. She is the award-winning author of Shaping the Future of African American Film: Color-coded Economics and the Story Behind the Numbers and the co-author of Breaking It Down: Audition Techniques for Actors of the Global Majority. Dr. Ndounou is also an actor, director, producer, and creator. She co-curated Echoes of Us, directed by Michele Shay, which launched in San Francisco in 2022 with performances in Los Angeles in 2023 and 2025 at the first annual LA Black Creators Summit held in collaboration with Support Black Theatre, CRAFT, and the African-American Shakespeare Company. Dr. Ndounou is also a co-founder of CreateEnsemble.com, a digital platform for creative artists of color. Her forthcoming works include the co-edited Milestones in Black American Theatre and Performance and a multi-media project she will be working on during the Newhouse Fellowship titled Acting Your Color: The CRAFT, Power, and Paradox of Acting for Black Americans, which includes a book focusing on Black American contributions to developing acting theories and practices from 1950s to the present.