Kimberly Dixon-Mays is a poet, playwright and performer. As a playwright, Kimberly has received readings and staged productions at Crossroads Theatre Company, Plowshares Theatre Company, Emotive Fruition, Windy City Playhouse, Rivendell Theatre and Mad Cow Theatre. In addition, from 2005-2013 she was a recurring member of the Guild Literary Complex’s devised theater project the Poetry Performance Incubator (Artistic Director Coya Paz).

Among other theater honors, Kimberly’s play The Gizzard of Brownsville was a 2002 finalist for the Theodore Ward Prize for African-American Playwrights; (Nine) was a featured reading for Congo Square Theatre Company’s 2019 August Wilson New Play Initiative, and a semi-finalist for the 2019 Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. She was also a semi-finalist for the 2020 National Black Theatre I Am Soul Playwright Residency and received a Soul Series Lab Playwriting Micro-Development Session with NBT for her play When Given a Choice, Bleed. In Fall 2020 she was an Artist in Residence with Chicago State University, and was nominated for a 2021 3Arts Award.

Kimberly was a 2018-20 Russ Tutterow Fellow with Chicago Dramatists. She holds a B.A. in Psychology/Theater Studies from Yale, an M.A. in Afro-American Studies (playwriting concentration) from UCLA, and a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Theatre/Drama from Northwestern.