Kamilah Forbes (BFA ’98) will be bestowed with Howard University’s 2026 Alumni Award for Distinguished Postgraduate Achievement during this year’s Charter Day celebration, an honor in recognition of her work as an award-winning director, producer, and creative visionary. 

Before being one of the most sought-after directors and assuming her current role as Executive Producer at the legendary Apollo Theater, Forbes was a student in Howard’s theatre department in the College of Fine Arts. It was during her time at the university where her cultural storytelling roots began to take shape. She started writing the stage play “Rhyme Deferred” in 1998 alongside fellow friend and collaborator, the late actor Chadwick Boseman (BFA ’00). The play, Forbes explained, began not as a story, but as an experiment to see the performance elements of hip hop (DJ’ing, MC’ing, and B’boying) on stage communicating with one another, telling a story.

“Chad wrote poems and I was a hip hop kid,” Forbes recalled. “I started to experiment about what kind of a story structure and performance could be related to those elements, and then ‘Rhyme Deferred’ was born.”

Forbes directed the production of “Rhym Deferred,” which premiered in 2000 under the Hip-Hop Theatre Junction, the company she started with Boseman and fellow Howard classmates after she graduated from the university. 

The Hip-Hop Theatre Junction was the impetus that led Forbes to co-establishing the Obie-Award winning Hip-Hop Theatre Festival. The entity grew from a fledgling project into a groundbreaking nonprofit organization, now called Hi-ARTS, where Forbes served as its producing artistic director for 16 years. From “Rhyme Deferred,” to being the first tour director of the Tony Award-winning series “Def Poetry Jam,” to making her movie directorial debut with the 2020 film adaptation of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book “Between the World and Me” and more, Forbes has stayed true to her goal of amplifying Black voices and creating successful Black cultural productions.

“I feel like I walk away with a much bigger purpose than myself in how I work and the projects I choose,” said Forbes. “Service does not just require being in a political position. Service actually happens at every turn and every level of society. I think that's what Howard really instilled in me.”

Amplifying Black Stories

Forbes, a Chicago native with Jamaican roots, developed her innovative spirit in Howard’s College of Fine Arts. She credits her time in former Howard theatre professor Sybil Roberts’ “Playwrights Lab” in developing her artistic voice and for spurring the inspiration behind “Rhyme Deferred.” 

“I wasn’t a playwriting student, and I didn’t consider myself a playwright,” said Forbes. “Roberts pushed us to find our voice with the Playwrights Lab. It wasn’t a formal class — we met after classes in her office, and she would give us prompts to kind of write our own stories and to literally find our own voice.” 

With this foundation, Forbes has gone on to be one of the most prominent voices in American theater. She was the associate director for Kenny Leon’s Broadway productions, including the Tony Award-winning “A Raisin in the Sun,” “The Mountaintop,” and “Stick Fly.” She’s also collaborated with some of the country’s most prolific writers, directing “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark,” written by the Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage; “Blood Quilt,” written by Katori Hall; “Sunset Baby” and “Detroit 67,” written by Dominique Morrisseau.

In 2023, Forbes directed “Hippest Trip: The Soul Train Musical,” also written by Morrisseau. The musical takes audiences back to Chicago in 1971 as DJ Don Cornelius transforms the pop culture landscape with his TV show bringing Black music, dance, and style into American living rooms.

When asked how she makes period pieces feel timeless, Forbes shared that “I’m always looking for ways to make sure that the joy feels current and doesn't feel like some kind of historical relic. I want you to feel it in this room as if it’s very palpable for the moment that we're living in so that it doesn't only feel historical. Our art should feel like the past, present, and future all as one. That’s always, for me, aesthetically where the excitement comes.”

From Howard to The Apollo

As the curator in residence at the Kennedy Center, Forbes developed works such as the 40th-anniversary celebration of Marvin Gaye’s “What's Going On” featuring John Legend, and the symphonic collaboration for Nas’s “Illmatic” 20 Year Anniversary with the National Symphony Orchestra. 

Since joining the Apollo Theater in 2016, Forbes expanded its artistic reach and reputation, transforming it from a legacy institution into one of the nation’s leading contemporary performing arts centers. She oversaw an $85 million capital campaign, which led to the opening of the historic Victoria Theater, a space dedicated to supporting new, multidisciplinary work. 

“The Apollo is a sacred cultural ground and that means that we have to participate in the culture that is relevant today,” she said. “We have to look to today and to the future and to what artists are currently doing, what they're saying. We fall into traps of romanticizing of the past. What that does is potentially stymies us from moving forward. What I'm concerned about, as a leader, is what are people going to say about today, 60 years from now? We work from that vantage point, build from that vantage point, and we program from that vantage point versus sitting and recycling ourselves like a museum talking about what we did 60 years prior.”

In addition to this works, Forbes is also making waves in film and television with her directorial vision. She co-owns the production company Maceo-Lyn with fellow Howard classmate and writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. Under Maceo-Lyn, Forbes served as an executive producer of the 2026 film “When a Witness Recants,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and was named as one of Variety’s best movies from this year’s festival. The movie, she said, is set to be released on HBO later this year. 

Forbes takes service and community connections seriously with her appointments on various committees and executive boards. She lends her expertise and guidance on boards such as Howard’s Board of Visitors for the College of Fine Arts, the Yale Schwarzman Center Advisory Board, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s NYC Arts and Culture Transition Committee. She shared that Howard’s motto of “Truth in Service” is something that helps to guide her work and community commitments. 

“These are all voluntary positions but also very important roles,” Forbes emphasized. “By serving in these board positions, I’m not just representing myself. I'm representing a community of people that will be affected by the decisions that are made at that level. I realize how important it is to have a multiplicity of voices at the table, and having a seat at that table matters.”

Feature photo by Nicole Modestin, courtesy of Kamilah Forbes.