Azure Lorica FanFilm Awards 2020
Best Actress for "Project Cadmus"
Sympatico and John J Crawford III
Washington Post Magazine
April 2016
After 21 years, this D.C. actress is enjoying a ‘season of firsts’
by Abdul Ali
2016 Helen Hayes Award Outstanding Lead Actress in a Play
Theater J's Queen's Girl in the World by Caleen Sinnette Jennings
directed by Eleanor Holdridge
2016 Helen Hayes Nomination Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Play
Woolly Mammoth's Zombie: The American by Robert O'Hara
directed by Howard Shalwitz
2015 NY Times Review for The Women's Voices Theatre Festival
by Charles Isherwood
Theater J's
Queen's Girl in the World by Caleen Sinnette Jennings
Directed by Eleanor Holdridge
Dawn Ursula is a lovely name for the remarkably gifted young actor starring in Caleen Sinnette Jennings’s sweet-spirited solo show “Queens Girl in the World,” directed by Eleanor Holdridge and presented by Theater J. The principal character is Jacqueline Marie Butler, daughter of a middle-class black couple with high ambitions for her.
Ms. Ursula also portrays — with star-quality brilliance — numerous other characters: Jacqueline’s imperious mother and her doctor father, who watch in consternation their 12-year-old daughter’s budding friendship with a neighbor, the boys she develops crushes on, the new friends she makes when her parents remove her from that neighbor’s influence by sending her to middle school at a school in Greenwich Village peopled mostly by Jewish kids.
The time is the turbulent early years of the civil rights movement. Ms. Jennings captures with admirable fluency the various voices of her characters, and in Ms. Ursula she finds the perfect actor to convey the play’s poignancy, as Jacqueline finds herself emotionally adrift: neither fully at home in the culture she was born into nor in the intellectually stimulating, politicized atmosphere of her nearly all-white new school.
2015 Helen Hayes Nomination Outstanding Lead Actress and Outstanding Ensemble
Woolly Mammoth's We are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, between the Years 1884 - 1915 by Jackie Sibblies Drury
directed by Michael John Garcés
2015 Baltimore City Paper “Best Actress” Award
Everyman Theatre's Ruined by Lynn Nottage
directed by Tazewell Thompson
2014 Helen Hayes Award Outstanding Supporting Actress, Resident Play
Woolly Mammoth's The Convert by Danai Gurira
directed by Michael John Garcés
2012 Washington Post Article
12 Washington actors to watch
by theater critic Peter Marks
In the pair of characters assigned to her in “Clybourne Park,” Bruce Norris’s Pulitzer-winning examination of racial attitudes in two epochs, Ursula gave the Woolly Mammoth Theatre production its humility and then its bite. In the first act she was the housekeeper for a white middle-class family of the ’50s, absorbing the indignities — intended or not — meted out by her white employers and their neighbors. In the second, she played a fiercer, more confident character of the present day, a woman dreading the arrival to her community of affluent white couples, disconnected from the struggles of the neighborhood’s black families.
Through the twin parts, audiences had the opportunity to glimpse something deeper in her talent, an ability to project, in tense cohabitation, sorrow mixed with rage.
Best Actress for "Project Cadmus"
Sympatico and John J Crawford III
Washington Post Magazine
April 2016
After 21 years, this D.C. actress is enjoying a ‘season of firsts’
by Abdul Ali
2016 Helen Hayes Award Outstanding Lead Actress in a Play
Theater J's Queen's Girl in the World by Caleen Sinnette Jennings
directed by Eleanor Holdridge
2016 Helen Hayes Nomination Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Play
Woolly Mammoth's Zombie: The American by Robert O'Hara
directed by Howard Shalwitz
2015 NY Times Review for The Women's Voices Theatre Festival
by Charles Isherwood
Theater J's
Queen's Girl in the World by Caleen Sinnette Jennings
Directed by Eleanor Holdridge
Dawn Ursula is a lovely name for the remarkably gifted young actor starring in Caleen Sinnette Jennings’s sweet-spirited solo show “Queens Girl in the World,” directed by Eleanor Holdridge and presented by Theater J. The principal character is Jacqueline Marie Butler, daughter of a middle-class black couple with high ambitions for her.
Ms. Ursula also portrays — with star-quality brilliance — numerous other characters: Jacqueline’s imperious mother and her doctor father, who watch in consternation their 12-year-old daughter’s budding friendship with a neighbor, the boys she develops crushes on, the new friends she makes when her parents remove her from that neighbor’s influence by sending her to middle school at a school in Greenwich Village peopled mostly by Jewish kids.
The time is the turbulent early years of the civil rights movement. Ms. Jennings captures with admirable fluency the various voices of her characters, and in Ms. Ursula she finds the perfect actor to convey the play’s poignancy, as Jacqueline finds herself emotionally adrift: neither fully at home in the culture she was born into nor in the intellectually stimulating, politicized atmosphere of her nearly all-white new school.
2015 Helen Hayes Nomination Outstanding Lead Actress and Outstanding Ensemble
Woolly Mammoth's We are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, between the Years 1884 - 1915 by Jackie Sibblies Drury
directed by Michael John Garcés
2015 Baltimore City Paper “Best Actress” Award
Everyman Theatre's Ruined by Lynn Nottage
directed by Tazewell Thompson
2014 Helen Hayes Award Outstanding Supporting Actress, Resident Play
Woolly Mammoth's The Convert by Danai Gurira
directed by Michael John Garcés
2012 Washington Post Article
12 Washington actors to watch
by theater critic Peter Marks
In the pair of characters assigned to her in “Clybourne Park,” Bruce Norris’s Pulitzer-winning examination of racial attitudes in two epochs, Ursula gave the Woolly Mammoth Theatre production its humility and then its bite. In the first act she was the housekeeper for a white middle-class family of the ’50s, absorbing the indignities — intended or not — meted out by her white employers and their neighbors. In the second, she played a fiercer, more confident character of the present day, a woman dreading the arrival to her community of affluent white couples, disconnected from the struggles of the neighborhood’s black families.
Through the twin parts, audiences had the opportunity to glimpse something deeper in her talent, an ability to project, in tense cohabitation, sorrow mixed with rage.
2011 Helen Hayes Nomination Outstanding Supporting Actress and
Outstanding Ensemble, Resident Play
Woolly Mammoth's Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris
directed by Howard Shalwitz
2011 Baltimore City Paper “Best Actress” Award
Everyman Theatre's A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
directed by Jennifer Nelson
2011 Baltimore City Paper "Best Production" Award
Everyman Theatre's A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
directed by Jennifer Nelson
2008 Baltimore City Paper “Best Actress” Award
Everyman Theatre's Gem of the Ocean by August Wilson
directed by Jennifer Nelson
2005 Baltimore City Paper "Best Production" Award
Everyman Theatre's Yellowman by Dael Orlandersmith
directed by Reggie Life
Outstanding Ensemble, Resident Play
Woolly Mammoth's Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris
directed by Howard Shalwitz
2011 Baltimore City Paper “Best Actress” Award
Everyman Theatre's A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
directed by Jennifer Nelson
2011 Baltimore City Paper "Best Production" Award
Everyman Theatre's A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
directed by Jennifer Nelson
2008 Baltimore City Paper “Best Actress” Award
Everyman Theatre's Gem of the Ocean by August Wilson
directed by Jennifer Nelson
2005 Baltimore City Paper "Best Production" Award
Everyman Theatre's Yellowman by Dael Orlandersmith
directed by Reggie Life
photo by Marvin Joseph
