Seret Scott

Seret Scott is an American actress, director, and playwright born on September 1, 1949, in Washington, D.C. Her early years in the city were shaped by segregation and the civil rights movement. In 1969, she left New York University to join the Free Southern Theater, a community theater group aligned with the civil rights movement that brought free, socially engaged theater to African American audiences in the South.

After returning to New York City, Scott participated in activist theater, including anti-Vietnam performances and productions staged for inmates at Rikers Island and Sing Sing prisons. She began her off-Broadway career in 1970 with an appearance in Slave Ship at Theatre-in-the-Church in New York City. Her Broadway debut came in 1974, when she played Sue Belle in Ray Aranha's My Sister, My Sister, a production for which she received a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance. She returned to Broadway in 1976 in Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf.

Scott's screen career began with a role as Flora in Pretty Baby, the 1978 drama directed by Louis Malle and starring Brooke Shields, Keith Carradine, and Susan Sarandon. In April 1982, she appeared in Kathleen Collins's play The Brothers at the American Place Theater in New York City, and that same year she played Sara, a professor of French philosophy, in Collins's film Losing Ground. The film was among the first feature films directed by an African American woman and won first prize at the Figueroa International Film Festival in Portugal, though it did not receive widespread recognition until decades later. Scott also appeared in television series including Miami Vice and Cosby throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as well as The Equalizer.

In 1989, Scott made her directorial debut with Some Sweet Day, written by Nancy Fales Garrett, which received a favorable review in the New York Times. She subsequently transitioned into directing full time, working at venues including San Diego's Old Globe Theatre, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Chicago's Court Theatre. In 1997, she directed John Henry Redwood's The Old Settler at The Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C. Scott has been a resident of Teaneck, New Jersey.