Performance Dates & Times
Thursday, November 6th at 7:30pm

Friday, November 7th at 7:30pm

Saturday, November 8th at 3:00pm

Saturday, November 6th at 7:30pm

Masks will be optional during these performances.

CAMILLE SIMONE THOMAS: SWEET BLOOD

This performance is a part of JACKLABS resident artist series

Directed by Raecine Singletary
Produced by Camille S. Thomas, Renee Harrison & Jordan Powell
Assitant Directed by Jordan Powell
Scenic Design by Ezekial Clare
Lighting Design by Kristen Paige

Sweet Blood traces the lives of three free Afro-Taino Maroon sisters in colonial Jamaica as they navigate familial love, cultural commitments, lineage, and liberation. Drawing on ancestral memory and critical fabulation, the play unearths stories buried beneath the colonial archive, imagining what freedom might have felt like for Black women living in the shadow of slavery. 

At once intimate and epic, Sweet Blood asks what it means to inherit histories of both resistance and how we carry the weight of our ancestors’ struggles in our own bodies. Through lyrical language and embodied storytelling, the play blurs the boundaries between the living and the dead, the remembered and the forgotten. It is an offering, a mourning song, and a celebration: for the women who came before, for the daughters yet to come, for the possibilities of liberation that refuse to die.

About the Artists

Camille Simone Thomas (Playwright, Producer) is a 5th generation Detroiter through her father’s side and a first generation Jamaican through her mothers. It’s important for her to name this because her work most often interrogates cultural legacies, familial healing, spirituality + ancestral wisdom, and the general kicking and screaming of how Black folks get free despite the oppressive forces of colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy. She’s a multi-hyphenate playwright-producer-performer-educator. Her plays have been workshopped and performed at The Connelly Theatre, MCC, New York Theatre Workshop, Playwrights Horizons, Sanguine Theatre Company, Blackboard Playwriting series, Lime Arts Theatre company, American Slavery Project, The Obie Award-winning Harlem9 and Detroit Public Theatre Company, Dixon Place, Workshop Theatre, Barter Theatre Company, The National Women's Theatre Festival, The Brick, and more! She was a 2023 Broadway Advocacy Coalition Artivism fellow. A 2024 finalist for the Eugene O’neill NPC for her play “At God’s Back”. A 2023 New Harmony Project finalist, 2023 Hedgebrook Writers retreat finalist, 2023 Catskills Creative Residency finalist. She was in the 2024/2025 Civilians R&D Group, 2024/25 Artistic Research Fellow at The Folger in DC, and is currently the 2024/25 JACKLabs Artist.

Raecine Singletary (Director) is a Jamaican American director and Baltimore native. She works to cultivate art that centers, celebrates, and uplifts the revolutionary joy that continues to shine specifically through Black women and youth; igniting an upswell of healing through unrelenting joy. She has worked as a director with Mercury Store, Broadway Advocacy Coalition, Playwrights Horizons New Works Lab, Baltimore Center Stage, Pittsburgh Classic Theatre, Lime Arts Productions, The Hansberry Project, City Theatre, and Point Park University. She has collaborated as an assistant director alongside numerous directors including Rebecca Martinez, Dustin Wills, Jenny Koons, Pam MacKinnon, Awoye Timpo, etc. She was a Robert Moss Directing Fellow at Playwrights Horizons and a former member of the New Georges Jam. Raecine holds a B.A. in Theatre Arts with a concentration in Directing from Point Park University.

CREATIVE TEAM

Jacques Matellus (Sound Designer) is an actor and sound designer based in Brockton MA and is excited to be working on this project! His most recent sound credits include NO CHILD.. at Gloucester stage company, NAWFSIDE at the Tank, and Ain't no Mo at speakeasy stage as an assistant to the sound designer. He has studied music production and audio mixing at Berkelee College of Music. Thank you God, always 

Renee Harrison (Co-producer)  is a Jamaican-born, New Jersey-raised, and Los Angeles-based actor and creative producer. She is the founder of Black Girls Do Theater, a social impact organization connecting Black girls and women with the works of our past, present, and future. Through this platform, Renee has produced dynamic programming in New York City, creating spaces that honor legacy while fostering innovation. A natural storyteller at heart, she marries her love for performance with a passion for intentional, authentic, and creative mediums—now bringing that same vision and commitment to Sweet Blood, her first theatrical production as a producer.

Jordan Powell (she/her) (Co-producer/Assistant director)  is a Jamaican American director, writer, filmmaker, designer, and educator. Her work as a writer and director is to bring together black women so we can, as a community, excavate our past and retell these stories through our bodies, voices, and new technological devices that help us archive these stories. Her work archives and documents the present so that we can be represented in the future. She has written and directed a film, Cutie, that was developed in the Nine Muses Lab taught by Bryce Dallas Howard. She has assistant-directed and directed plays at The Public’s Under the Radar Festival,  The Wild Project, The Brick, and the New York Theater Festival. Jordan often spends her studio sessions devising new imaginings. She was recently the creative producer and founder of The Archive: New Works by Black Women, a staged reading series that celebrates black women’s voices in theatre.

Ezekiel Clare (Set Designer)  is a set designer and photographer interested in examining and documenting our relationship to metaphysical thoughts and gender. Ezekiel was born and raised in New York City holding a BFA in Film from SUNY Purchase and is currently pursuing their MFA in set design from NYU. She has been working as a set designer for 4 years and 10 years as a photographer. Her work can be described as playful, direct, contained and minimal. Ezekiel loves solving problems and deconstructing things to their simplest which has led them to be guided by the philosophy “less is more”. Curiosity and play are at the forefront of her process from doing self portraits in her room to working with other artists in a theater. With any given space she tries to create a playground that fosters experimentation and learning as those are the foundations for all of their collaborative work. Set Design credits include:Tell Them My Dreadful Name (2025) at NYU, Fugue/State (2025) at NYU, Can't Make An Omelette (2025) Columbia University, Mud; or when things get messy and how we live with it for the SheNYC festival Off-Broadway at the Conelly Theatre (2024), Ghetto Alchemy:A Lunchroom Survival Guide at The Tank (2024), Lia Del Mar at Columbia University 2024, Powerline Road Art/NY(2023) The Fire This Time Festival at Wild project(2023) , Christians(2022), Marisol(2022), and How I Learned To Drive(2021) all at SUNY Purchase.

Development History

The Brick Interrobang Festival Spring 2024

Folger Library Artistic Research Fellowship "Whose Democracy" fellow 2024/2025

North American Cultural Laboratory 2024

JACKLabs Fellow 2024/2025