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Awotunde Iya Judyie Ella Al-Bilali, 72, professor of performance and theater for social change in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts (HFA), died Jan. 16.

Al-Bilali, who earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at UMass Amherst, joined the university faculty in 2013, becoming the first Black woman to hold the title of full professor in the department of theater. Her research focused on applied theater, theatre for social transformation, directing, performance and dramaturgy.

As an actor, director, playwright and producer, Al-Bilali worked off-Broadway and in regional theater nationwide. She taught at New York University’s Educational Theatre Program, the M.A. in Applied Theatre Program at City University of New York (CUNY), Amherst College, Hampshire College and around the world with Semester at Sea.

Al-Bilali was also author of two books, “For the Feeling: Love & Transformation from New York to Cape Town,” a memoir about her experiences living in South Africa, and “Halcyon Days,” a book of haiku poetry. Her work was also featured in the award-winning book “Black Acting Methods: A Critical Approach” and online.

She was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, where she created Brown Paper Studio, an applied theatre methodology, and was the recipient of numerous awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Kentucky Arts Council, the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation and the UMass President’s Creative Economy Initiatives Fund and MacDowell.

Al-Bilali was also an initiated priest in the Ifa-Orisa tradition, in which she held the title of “iyanifa,” which can be translated as mother of wisdom or mother of Ifa.

A celebration for the community to honor Al-Bilali is being planned for the spring, and additional details will be shared by HFA when available.

A reflection on the life of Al-Bilali, originally posted on the HFA website and written by Priscilla Maria Page, associate professor of dramaturgy and director of the Multicultural Theater Certificate program, can be found below.
 

Awotunde Judyie Ella Al-Bilali, 72, full professor of performance and theater for social change passed away on January 16, 2026.  

Iya, as she was known by her students, was the first Black woman to hold the title Full Professor in the Department of Theater at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She had a long-spanning relationship with the university that included her time as an undergraduate student in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies and the Department of Theater in the 1970s. She returned to campus nearly two decades later to earn her MFA in directing in 2001. For her third act, she joined the UMASS faculty in 2013 with a joint appointment in Theater and the Commonwealth Honors College. At CHC, she served as the longstanding Honors Program Director for theater. She later joined the Department of Afro-American Studies as an affiliated faculty member.  

She was an incredibly driven creative artist and educator with a career that began with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in Chicago in the late 1960s. Her early experiences with the AACM continually shaped her ideas about art, life, and liberation. These became foundational principles in her own creative practice and teachings. In the early 2000s, the Augusta Savage Gallery awarded her a grant to travel to Cape Town, South Africa, where she eventually founded Brown Paper Studio. Through this company she honed her artistic practice that centered the body as site of wisdom and viewed creativity as a path toward personal and collective liberation.  

During her time at UMass Amherst, she developed courses on applied theater and theater for social transformation while also teaching courses in directing, performance, and dramaturgy. Her teaching and creative work were often intertwined as she believed in mentoring young artists by making art together. In 2014, she designed and co-led Art, Legacy, & Community, a two-year project that used artistic process and production as a way for students to examine race, racial representation, and racial justice on campus, in our region, and across our nation. This culminated in the production of Collidescope 2.0: Adventures in Pre and Post-Racial America in Spring 2016. As the world emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic, she led the theater department back into production with the Rights of Spring Festival of April 2021. She had conducted research in traditional and contemporary West African festivals and brought those organizing principles forward with a 12-day festival of online and live events. In 2022-23, she undertook a research and development project with Professor Priscilla Maria Page that included a devised theater course on Latinx theater and the cultural expressions of people of the African diaspora. Their work led to the production of Many Patterns, One Cloth in Spring 2023. Her notable directing projects in the department of theater include Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks in 2012, Wole Soyinka’s adaptation of The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite in 2020, The Black Playwrights Celebration in 2022, and Unfinished Women Cry in No Man’s Land While a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage by Aisha Rahman in 2025.  

She was also a well-respected author whose publications include For the Feeling: Love & Transformation from New York to Cape Town. (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012). She also contributed two chapters to Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches, edited by Sharrell Luckett and Tia M. Shaffer, (Routledge, 2017) as well as an essay titled “The Circle” in Imagined Theatres: South Africa, curated by Megan Lewis, (Routledge, 2017). She had recently completed her second book Between Tattoos: A Biomythography in Three Acts.   
 
Awotunde Judyie Ella Al-Bilali was an organizer and someone who deeply believed in the strength of community. She was a beloved member of both Blacklist and a facilitator of Third Space, a writing group for faculty of color on campus, a founding member of Black Women United, a peer-mentoring group open to all Black women on campus, and a transformational leader in the Five College African Studies program. She brought an expansive vision to the concept of African Studies and her creativity during the time of the pandemic connected students and faculty from the continent and beyond into meaningful conversations with members of the council.  

She loved her students and held them in the highest regard, often continuing her mentorship with many of them in various ways including serving as an advisor to the Re-Emergence Collective, a group of budding theater artists largely comprised of UMass Amherst alums.  Judyie often ended her messages to her cherished communities with the words, “In Peace, Freedom & Community. Ashé”. This spoke to her steadfast belief in the power of coming together to create a more just world.