Dr. Osonye Tess Onwueme
Playwright   Novelist   Scholar   Cultural Activist   International Speaker   Performer

Africa’s best known female dramatist... Few artists match Dr. Onwueme's engaging presentation style in rhetoric, intellectual awareness, and social criticism (Dr. S. Darlington, 2004).

A writer with an active conscience, Dr. Tess Onwueme is one of the best known and most prolific contemporary playwrights whose provocative and humorous writing and speaking often poke into taboo and controversial subject.

She is a winner of several international awards, including the 2009 prestigious Fonlon-Nichols Award, and two major Ford Foundation awards in 2000 and 2001. In 2007 she was appointed to the US State Department Public Diplomacy Specialist/Speaker Program for North, West, and East India.

Among her numerous award-winning plays are: Tell It To Women (1997), What Mama Said (2004), Shakara: Dance-Hall Queen (2001), The Reign Of Wazobia (1988), The Broken Calabash (1984), Mirror for Campus (1987), and The Desert Encroaches (1985). Other creative works by Tess Onwueme include: No Vacancy (2005), The Missing Face (2006), Riot In Heaven (1996), Legacies (1989), Why the Elephant Has No Butt (2000), and Ban Empty Barn (1986).

An International Conference: Staging Women, Youth, Globalization, and Eco-Literature––exclusively dedicated to Onwueme’s work––was held in the capital of Nigeria, Abuja, from November 11-14, 2009. To mark the theatrefest in her honor, three of Onwueme’s plays–––Shakara, The Reign Of Wazobia and What Mama Said––were featured on stage at the Tess International Conference.

In December 2007, her socio-political allegory Parables for a Season had its world premiere in Khartoum, Sudan under the auspices of the KICS International Theatre, directed by the American artistic director, Mark Webber. The BBC World Drama Service produced Onwueme’s Shakara: Dance-Hall Queen in their worldwide broadcast in the fall of 2004 and 2005, respectively. From April to May 2001, her play, The Missing Face, was staged off-broadway by Woodie King, Jr. Producing Director at the New Federal Theatre, New York.

As a playwright, scholar, activist, Tess Onwueme’s works have a wide range of social, political, historical, cultural and environmental concerns of the masses in thee global community today, specifically women, youth, people of the Nigerian Niger-Delta, as well as Africans in the continent, the African Diaspora, with related Third Worlds.

Since joining the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, Wisconsin in 1994 as a Distinguished Professor of Cultural Diversity and Professor of English after her years of teaching in both Nigerian and American universities, Dr. Onwueme continues to serve as a role-model for women and youth through her inspirational writing and speaking that are steadily shaping and transforming public consciousness of issues impacting black women and youth in global societies today.

Dr. Onwueme was born in Ogwashi-Uku, Delta State, Nigeria on September 8, 1955. She is married with five children. Kenolisa Onwueme, Ebele Onwueme, Kunume Onwueme, Bundo Onwueme, and Malije Onwueme.