Cleavon Smith’s immersive theater project The Fillmore Eclipse, based on Bop City, a restaurant and jazz club located in San Francisco’s historic Fillmore District opened in April 2024. Cleavon’s other plays include The Incrementalist, commissioned through the Aurora Theatre Company’s Originate and Generate New Works Initiative. The Fall 2020 premiere of The Flats, co-written with Lauren Gunderson and Jonathan Spector, was Cleavon’s first commissioned work with the Aurora Theatre Company before The Incrementalist. As Playwright in Residence at Berkeley’s TheatreFIRST for three years, he wrote and produced six new plays and co-lead the facilitation for the devised play The People’s History of Next. TheatreFIRST’s production of his critically acclaimed The Last Sermon of Sister Imani was nominated for a 2018 Theatre Bay Area Best Production award, and his one-act play Just One Day was included in Between Us, a Theatre Bay Area “Best Anthology” award-winning production. Additionally, Cleavon has had dozens of short plays performed by theaters in Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose.
Cleavon is currently working with Tyler Merritt to turn his autobiography into a solo performance for live stage theatre. Also in the works are adaptations of the children’s book Imani’s Moon as well as Romeo and Juliet for which he received an Aurand Harris Theatre and Folger Shakespeare Library grant respectively. Also currently, Cleavon is a member of TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s inaugural CORE Writers Group and serves as faculty at Oregon State University.
Cleavon is the son of Cleavon Smith, Sr., a four-year track and field letterman and athlete for Mississippi Valley State University. Cleavon is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy where he played four years of varsity football, leading his team in touchdowns his junior year. After serving five years in the Navy, Cleavon received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Mills College with a focus on prose fiction and currently splits his time between Oakland, CA and Corvallis, OR.