Ty Jones: About the Artist
Click here to listen to his interview
NAACP Award winner, TY JONES is the Producing Artistic Director of the Classical Theatre of Harlem. He is a 2013 recipient of the Council of the City of New York Proclamation Award. His role with CTH since 2003 has included: Actor, Producer, Managing Director, Development Director and Board Chair. Under his leadership, CTH artistic programming has grown in both in scope and recognition. Mr. Jones initiated the acclaimed Uptown Meets Downtown™ program comprising strategic partnerships with downtown theatres designed to build artistic bridges between communities. He also led the inaugural Uptown Shakespeare in the Park, bringing free, outdoor, professional theatre to Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park for an extended run.
Ty appeared in the Tony Award- Winning production of Henry IV and Julius Caesar with Denzel Washington. For CTH Ty received Audelco Nominations for his performances in Macbeth, Trojan Women, Romeo and Juliet and won Best Actor for his portrayal of Nat Turner, in Emancipation: Chronicles of the Nat Turner Rebellion. He has been notably mentioned in a number of performances including Hamlet with the American Shakespeare Theatre Company in the title role, Paul in Six Degrees of Separation at the Baltimore Center Stage/MSC, Cory in Fences at the Guthrie, Sam Cooke in One Night in Miami at the Rogue Machine Theatre, and various credits at the Cincinnati Playhouse, Cleveland Playhouse, Pittsburgh Public and the Utah and New Jersey Shakespeare Festivals. Principal film roles include his work in Annie, Tower Heist, The Taking of Pelham123, Redacted, and The International. He has been seen in a number of episodics such as the Blacklist, Forever, Elementary, Ugly Betty, Fringe, and currently has a recurring role on POWER, the number one show on the Starz cable network. As a writer, Ty Jones’ play Emancipation: Chronicles of the Nat Turner Rebellion, premiered for the award- winning Classical Theatre of Harlem. Jones first created Emancipation as a screenplay; it was selected as a finalist in the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program, was endorsed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, received Honorable Merit from the Writer Digest Screenwriters Association, and won the San Francisco Black Film Festival Screenwriting Competition. Mr. Jones received his MFA from the University of Delaware’s Professional Theatre Training Program, where he was the recipient of the Presidential Citation for Outstanding Achievement Award as an alum, and was named “One of 25 to Watch” in TIME OUT magazine.