Hattie Winston is an actress and director.  Her Off-Broadway acting work includes: WE REAL COOL (1965), THE EXCEPTION AND THE RULE/THE PRODIGAL SON (1965), HAPPY ENDING/DAY OF ABSENCE(1965), SONG OF THE LUSITANIAN BOGEY (1968), KONGI’S HARVEST (1968), DADDY GOODNESS (1968), MAN BETTER MAN (1969), SAMBO (1969), BILLY NONAME (1970),  THE ME NOBODY KNOWS (1970), BLACK GIRL (1971), THE GREAT MACDADDY (1974), A PHOTOGRAPH (1977), THE MICHIGAN (1979), MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN (1980), LONG TIME SINCE YESTERDAY (1985), HER TALKING DRUM (1987), PRINCE (1988), NATIVITY: A LIFE (1990).  Her Broadway acting work includes: Hair, Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?, The Me Nobody Knows, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Scapino, I Love My Wife, and The Tap Dance Kid. Her television work includes: The Electric Company, The Soul Man, All Grown Up, Becker, and Nurse.  Her movies include: The Battle of Shaker Heights, Unbowed, Jackie Brown, The Cherokee Kid, A Show of Force and Without a Trace.  When Winston moved to California she became involved in Bonnie Franklin’s Classic Contemporary American Plays.  Here she directed such plays as For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf, The Amen Corner, and acted in Going to St. Ives, A Raisin in the Sun, The Glass Menagerie, American Menu, and Time Alone.  In 2016 The Slave Narratives: A Mighty, Mighty People a play Hattie Winston wrote and acted in was directed by Jenny Sullivan and performed in a Bonnie Franklin Classic Contemporary American Plays production at the Broad Stage Theatre in Santa Monica, California.  Winston won Obies for both MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN and THE MICHIGAN.  

Hattie Winston, born in Greenville, Mississippi, as a child heard the opera singer Leontyne Price, and decided to aspire to the arts.  Coming to New York City she landed with a family in Chelsea who got her involved in the Hudson Guild, the community’s center.  Robert Hooks did a seminar there that was so successful he turned his apartment into a theater laboratory.  He built a stage at one end and invited his friends, Barbara Ann Teer, Douglas Turner Ward, Paul Mann, Adolph Caesar, and Lonne Elder III, to join.  1964, The Group Theatre Workshop had now begun.  Hattie Winston was one of the young members of the group.  In 1965, Jerry Tallmer reviewed their first production WE REAL COOL based on a Gwendolyn Brooks poem and gave it a rave.  Joseph Papp saw it and made the group and play the warm-up act for the Mobile Unit of The New York Shakespeare Festival.  Later Robert Hooks started The Negro Ensemble Company and Winston joined it as the only student from The Group Theatre Workshop to do so.  From here on her career took off distinguishing herself Off-Broadway, on Broadway, in movies and on television.  During Two Gentlemen of Verona on Broadway, Winston reconnected with Harold Wheeler, the musical supervisor for the show, and they married.  Wheeler had been her student substitute music teacher at Howard University.