MARGARET B. WILKERSON

Speaker Bio, con't

"...Wilkerson was an active member of the Academic Senate, Co-Chairing the Special Scholarships Committee, Chairing the Special Admissions Committee, and serving as an elected member of the Committee on Committees, among others.  She also served on various Chancellor’s Advisory Committees and special task forces, including affirmative action and admissions, Title IX policies in athletics, and other important campus matters.  As a member of the African American Studies faculty, she taught courses on dramatic literature and led the Black Theatre Workshop which produced a number of successful productions on the Berkeley campus and on campuses in California and other states that reflected on the history and experience of African Americans.

From 1998 to 2007), Professor Wilkerson was on staff at the Ford Foundation in New York, first as a Program Officer in Higher Education overseeing U.S. grantmaking related to diversifying colleges and universities.  For the past 7 years, she was Director of Media, Arts and Culture, with programmatic responsibilities for the Foundation’s grantmaking in these fields in the U.S. and in Africa and the Middle East, Russia, Asia, and Latin America.

She is currently a Trustee of Mills College and has served on the Board of Trustees of the University of Redlands.  For 14 years, she was a faculty member of the Lilly Endowment for the Liberal Arts, a program of professional and institutional development for colleges and universities throughout the country, and served on a number of theatre and higher education committees and boards.  Her honors and awards include: induction into the Fellows of the American Theatre, a Kennedy Center program; various fellowships from Rockefeller and Ford Foundations; Exemplary Educational Leader from the American Association of Higher Education; Winona Lee Fletcher Award from the Black Theatre Network; and Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education."

Wilkerson’s research interests are the historical and cultural dimensions of theatre. She is the author of 9 Plays by Black Women, the first anthology of its kind, and her biography of Lorraine Hansberry, based on unrestricted access to her unpublished papers, is projected for publication by the University of Michigan Press in 2009. 

She received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Dramatic Art from U.C. Berkeley, and an honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters from her undergraduate alma mater, the University of Redlands.