Eisa Davis

Eisa Davis, born May 5, 1971, in Berkeley, California, is an American playwright, actress, and singer-songwriter. She is the niece of political activist Angela Davis. As a child, she took dance classes and studied voice and classical piano through the Young Musicians Program at UC Berkeley. After graduating from Berkeley High School, she earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard University, then completed a Master of Fine Arts at the Actors Studio at the New School for Social Research, where she double majored in playwriting and acting. The dean of her program noted that her dance abilities were strong enough to have earned her admission to Alvin Ailey.

Davis began her professional acting career at age ten, appearing on a local television show, and continued performing in plays, industrials, and films through high school and college. Following college, she relocated to Los Angeles, where she worked with Anna Deavere Smith on Twilight, Los Angeles: 1992. After graduate school, she took on television and film roles, including appearances in The Wire and Soul Food. She became a lifetime member of the Actors Studio and a resident playwright at New Dramatists. Her work as a hip hop journalist for Rap Sheet and The Source informed her advocacy for the intersection of theater and hip hop, expressed through essays and participation in the Hip-Hop Theater Festival. She also became a poetry fellow at Cave Canem.

Davis appeared in The 24 Hour Plays in 2004. Her play Bulrusher premiered at Urban Stages in 2006 and received a Pulitzer Prize nomination. In 2007, she won an Obie Award with the ensemble of Passing Strange, a production that originated at Berkeley Rep before transferring to Broadway in 2008, where Davis performed in it. The entire Broadway production was subsequently filmed by Spike Lee. In 2009, Davis wrote and starred in Angela's Mixtape, an autobiographical play drawing on her upbringing in the Bay Area and her family's political environment. The New Yorker included it among the best plays of that year.

Davis played Addie Pickett, a nurse and receptionist, in The CW series Hart of Dixie, a show centered on a New York City doctor played by Rachel Bilson adjusting to life in a small Southern town. She later appeared in House of Cards, Mare of Easttown, and Kindred. Her television writing credits include Spike Lee's Netflix series She's Gotta Have It and Justified: City Primeval. She also co-created the Warriors concept album with Lin-Manuel Miranda. Davis has released two albums of her own music, Something Else and Tinctures, and some of her songs appeared on the Showtime series Soul Food. She narrated the role of Celestial Davenport Hamilton in the audiobook of An American Marriage by Tayari Jones.

During the 2012–13 season, Davis served as Symphony Space's artist-in-residence, and in 2013–14 she taught at Williams College as an Arthur Levitt Fellow. Her play Mushroom, a bilingual work about mushroom pickers near Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, earned several Barrymore nominations following its 2022 premiere. Bulrusher received a production at Berkeley Rep from October 27 through December 3, 2023, and in 2024 was adapted into an opera by West Edge Opera in Berkeley as part of that company's summer festival. Davis has won an Obie Award for Sustained Excellence in Performance for her stage acting in New York. She resides in Brooklyn.