Nolan Williams Jr. is a creative force — award-winning producer, music director, composer/lyricist, playwright, filmmaker, musicologist and cultural curator. He’s the founder and CEO of NEWorks Productions, a leading producer of impact-arts programming and entertainment since 2003, and he’s dedicated his professional career to creating works that illuminate issues of civil rights, social justice and cultural curiosities.
He’ll discuss this work at 3:30 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy, presenting the Week Nine — and the season’s final — installment of the African American Heritage House’s Chautauqua Speaker Series.
Williams’ body of work includes choral/orchestral works premiered by major American orchestras; music for television; the bestselling African American Heritage Hymnal (over 500,000 copies sold worldwide); songwriting credits on two Grammy-nominated projects; arts and educational festivals produced in partnership with The Kennedy Center and Philadelphia’s Mann Center; cultural programming developed with the Smithsonian, U.S. State Department and multiple embassies, and video/documentary projects, including the 2020 star-studded viral video “I Have A Right To Vote” — which to date has been viewed more than 2 million times.
“We hope that people will be called to action, regardless of the long lines, regardless of what’s happening with the postal service, regardless of what you have to contend with,” Williams told WUSA. “Do not let anything or anyone deter you from exercising your right to vote.”
Williams is also the driving force behind “Becoming Douglass Commonwealth,” which won 10 media prizes, and a slate of theatrical productions. He’s the founding artistic director of the Washington Douglass Chorale, and in 2019 was named the Kennedy Center’s inaugural Social Practice Resident. Earlier this year, he was named a DCCAH Arts & Humanities Fellow, honored with a 2024 Living Legends Award for Service to Humanity, and recognized by Oberlin College during Black History Month as one of 21 trailblazing Black alumni.
In 2022, his musical GRACE won 11 Broadway World Washington D.C. awards, including best musical and best new musical.
“In a market full of rich theater offerings, it is tremendous that we have emerged as the clear people’s choice,” Williams told the Washington Informer last year. “It’s exciting because it speaks to how the show’s message, music, and spirit resonates with everyday folks and astute theatergoers.”
GRACE, which explores Black culinary traditions through the story of a family mourning its matriarch while trying to save the family’s restaurant, began as a musical research project more than anything else, Williams told Washingtonian in 2022. He was working with his mentor Steven Newsome, the former director of the Anacostia Community Museum, and “once I started looking into the materials he shared, and then doing further research, I really discovered what I believe to be a unique perspective of American history through the lens of African American foodways,” Williams said. “Literally, the history just started singing to me.”
