Biography

Spelman College instructor Joan McCarty has an extensive background in theater and performance. She is currently serving as the stage manager for the 2018 season at Horizon Theatre where she was on the stage management team for last summer’s production of "Blackberry Daze" directed by Tom Jones. Her Horizon Theatre productions include "Wishful Thinking, Blue and Time Flies."

Her Atlanta credits include stage managing Theatre in the Square’s "His Eye is on the Sparrow," "Secrets of a Soccer Mom," "The Piano Lesson," and "A Raisin in the Sun." She was the assistant stage manager there for "The Persians," "Room Service" and for True Colors’ "Tambourines to Glory." At True Colors Theatre Company she also staged managed Stick Fly.  She has stage managed at Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago, at Milwaukee Repertory, the Black Ensemble of Chicago, Atlanta’s Theatrical Outfit, and at several other theaters. McCarty has been a proud member of Actors’ Equity Association for 35 years.

McCarty was a member of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP) in 1969. She worked in the areas of education and with the community busing to prisons program until 1974 when the BPP moved its operations to Oakland, California. In previous years, she  taught a class at Spelman on the history of women in the Black Panther Party. McCarty is an active member of the Illinois History Black Panther Party Project. The project seeks to gather oral histories of surviving BPP members and friends of the BPP.