James Ijames Joins the School of the Arts as a New Professor

School of the Arts welcomes a new faculty member this fall—James Ijames, who will be the head of the playwriting concentration in the Theatre Program.

His play, Fat Ham—which transposes Hamlet to a family barbecue in the American South to wrestle with questions of identity, kinship, and responsibility—won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Drama, and was a 2023 nominee for the Tony Award for Best Play.

James’s plays have been produced by, among others, Flashpoint Theater Company, Orbiter 3, Theatre Horizon, the National Black Theatre, the Public Theater, Hudson Valley Shakespeare Theater, and Steppenwolf Theatre, and have been developed with PlayPenn New Play Conference, the Lark, Playwright's Horizon, Clubbed Thumb, Villanova Theater, and Victory Garden. 

Other honors include the F. Otto Haas Award for an Emerging Artist, two Barrymore Awards for Outstanding Direction of a Play, a Pew Fellowship for Playwriting, the Terrence McNally New Play Award, the Whiting Award, a Kesselring Prize, and two Steinberg Prizes.

Columbia News caught up with James to discuss his plans for his students, his work, and the path that led to his arrival at Columbia.

How does it feel to be at School of the Arts?

I’m really excited to begin teaching again. I’ve been on leave from Villanova, the university where I previously taught, so I’m eager to get back into the room with students. They are the most energizing element of my practice as an artist. 

What classes will you teach this fall?

Two—a rewriting and play development course with our second-year playwrights, and a dramatic literature course called the American Contemporary Play. 

What are your plans for the playwriting concentration?

For now, I want to see how the program works. I don’t want to change anything that is working beautifully. But I do have ambitions for the concentration. I’m a formally ambitious writer, and I’m hoping to bring some of my background as a performer and theater deviser to the concentration. I want to turn the whole experience into the most rigorous playground you can imagine for a writer. 

What was your path to a career as a playwright, director, and educator?

Quite haphazard, actually. I found my way to theater through music, but I’ve been writing plays since I was about 16. It wasn’t until I was in college that I realized I wanted to study theater. I was a late bloomer. But once I knew I wanted to make a life in theater, I tried to learn as much as I could on my own. As a result, I tried a lot of different parts of theater-making—acting, writing, directing, design, you name it. 

How do you balance the demands of your own work and teaching?

They feed each other. When I’m teaching, I think about how I can bring my students closer to my work and practice, and when I’m in rehearsal at a theater, I’m thinking of how I can build on my professional work to support my students. One thing pours into the other.

What are you working on now?

There are three big things coming up! I’m co-writing the book for the musical, Saturday Church, at New York Theatre Workshop; I have an exciting workshop of a new play called Welcome Table with Rachel Chavkin; and I have a world premiere of a new play of mine, Wilderness Generation, at the Philadelphia Theatre Company, directed by Taibi Magar.

Advice for anyone intent on pursuing a trajectory similar to yours?

Don’t give up, keep going, be ambitious and irreverent in your youth because the world will bend you toward familiarity over time. Remember the job of the artist is to make the familiar, strange and the strange … familiar. Stay the oddest version of yourself: That’s what people respond to.