Debra Mims

Pronouns: she/her

Debra Mims has been an actress for over thirty years and was an arts producer at PBS for fourteen years. With additional dance training, she earned a BFA in Theatre Performance from Marygrove College in Detroit, Michigan. She has performed at the Georgetown Theatre Company, the Children’s Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin, and the Detroit-Windsor Dance Company. Debra is the 2010 Individual Artist Award winner for solo performance from the Maryland State Arts Council. She also won this award previously in 2004, 2008, 2010, and 2016. Previous performances have included Decatur House, Sewall Belmont House in Washington, DC, and the Reginald Lewis Museum in Baltimore, MD. The Walters Art Museum, National Portrait Gallery, and the Anacostia Museum in Washington, DC.

Artist Statement

My art, storytelling, utilizes the solo performance experience to speak to issues of history, emotional memory and art as reflected by an African American woman. The words of my grandmother, Kathryn Mims, have been the inspiration for a number of my programs. My Grandma Mims used to say, “If you don’t know where you’ve been, how are you going to know where you’re going?” In my work, I use first-person testimony, folk tales, and cultural idioms from the African and African American experience to construct narratives that give a voice to the past, and that is relevant to our 21st-century experience. As appropriate, I combine song, dance and music to compliment the dramatic storytelling giving the audience a multi- level experience. It is my mission to communicate the beauty and importance of history, emotional memory and culture. I find that, as an elder, it is vitally important for me to leave a cultural legacy that educates and resonates. “Storytelling is My Art, and my Joy.”