Christina Harley

Christina is a proud Bruin and a graduate of UCLA's Theater Arts program. She was very active in the African Student Union at UCLA where she co-wrote and co-produced, and performed in the program "Ebony Suite: A Tribute To Black Music and Dance." After graduation, Christina began writing and performing with a sketch comedy group called "Black Women In Comedy" which performed at the Tsunami Theater in Los Feliz California. "Black Women In Comedy" is an ensemble that explored African-American women's issues in the format of sketch comedy. Soon after her work with BWIC, Christina wrote and performed in her first full-length play, The Dreamers which is a drama centering around a poor southern African-American family and begins with the household hearing the news of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination on the television. The Dreamers was selected by the Fountain Theater to be performed in their program "No Ordinary Flowers-A Festival Of Readings" celebrating works written by African-American women. The Dreamers was first produced in 1998 through a grant presented by the City of Inglewood. In 1999, The Dreamers was produced at the Chicago ETA Theater Arts Foundation, as well as Los Angeles' Zephyr Theater, starring Glynn Turman, Vanessa Bell Calloway, Art Evans, and Christina Harley. This LA production was also presented as a special event of "A Season For Non-Violence," a yearly festival that recognizes the contributions of artists and citizens in the Los Angeles Community that emulate the messages of both Dr. Martin Luther King and Gandhi. In 2000, Chicago's Black Theater Alliance honored The Dreamers with a total of eleven nominations, and presented it with the Play of the Year award, and Christina with the Lorraine Hansberry Best Writing of an Original Play award. The Dreamers is also published by Smith & Krause Publishers of New York. Christina has also completed the screenplay adaptation of The Dreamers. In 2002, Christina won a fellowship to the Bill Cosby Writing Program where she completed her comedy "Graduating Fifth Grade," about a kid-hating, out-of-work, bad actor who succumbs to accepting a long term substitute teaching position to the worst set of fifth graders at an inner-city Los Angeles elementary school. Debbie Allen directed a staged reading of the script at the Writer's Guild of America in Los Angeles in September of 2003. In 2006, Art Share Los Angeles, a non-profit organization, sponsored a special fund-raising reading of The Dreamers, starring Loretta Devine. Soon after, in 2007, an encore staged reading was held at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. In 2007, "Graduating Fifth Grade" was optioned by Vincent Cirrincione & Associates management of Halle Berry, Mario Van Peebles, and Ruben Santiago and Taraji Hensen. In the fall of 2008, Christina will star as "Doris" in The Owl and The Pussycat at the Elephant Theater in Hollywood. The original Broadway production of "Owl" starred Alan Alda and the late African-American actress Diana Sands. Christina is honored to have the opportunity to pay homage to the legacy of Ms. Sands, an extraordinary talent of stage and screen.