Shirley Jo Finney, actress and theater director who championed Black works, dies at 74

Shirley Jo Finney, a celebrated theater director and actress, died Tuesday after an eight-month battle with cancer. She was 74.

Finney is best known for her decades-long association with the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles, a cultural space dedicated to multiethnic theater and dance artists, which announced her death on Friday.

During her long career, Finney directed works at some of the most respected regional theaters in America, including the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C, and the Humana Festival at the Actors Theater of Louisville in Kentucky. She earned plaudits, receiving the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle, Ovation and NAACP awards.

Discussing her work directing Pearl Cleage’s play “Flyin’ West” at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1999, Finney told The Times, “When I work, I work in a metaphysical realm, where the cast and I take each character and go through the death, resurrection and burial of each character.” “It’s like every time you have a thought — let go of an old way — you have a death, a new consciousness, and a new idea is formed.”

Finney considered herself an actor’s director, who viewed art as activism. She was frequently drawn to projects that explored themes of race and society. She directed the opera “Winnie,” based on the life of political icon Winnie Mandela, at the State Theater in Pretoria, South Africa, and “Facing Our Truth: Ten Minute Plays on Trayvon, Race and Privilege,” at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles. Following her 2015 production of “Citizen: An American Lyric,” a series of prose poems examining the ways that racism manifests itself in contemporary society, The Times theater critic Charles McNulty wrote: “The work, in short, has gotten under my skin, which is a testament to its power.”

Finney was born July 14, 1949, in Merced, Calif. She earned an MFA from UCLA and was an alumna of the American Film Institute’s Director Workshop for Women. Throughout her career she was an artist-in-residence at several colleges and universities, including Columbia College in Chicago, UC Santa Barbara, USC and UCLA.

Finney began working with the Fountain in 1997, with her acclaimed production of Endesha Ida Mae Holland’s “From the Mississippi Delta.”

“It shatters my heart beyond expression to announce the passing of my artistic sister,” said Fountain Theatre artistic director Stephen Sachs in a statement. “I am deeply, deeply devastated. She was my theatrical soulmate for 26 years.”

Earlier this year, Finney directed the play “Clyde’s” at the Ensemble Theatre in Houston. The Houston Chronicle called the work about recently incarcerated cooks an “enthusiastic interpretation.”

Although she is most closely associated with theater directing, Finney was also an accomplished actress. She appeared in such acclaimed television shows as “Hill Street Blues” and “Lou Grant.” In 1977, she played track and field athlete Wilma Rudolph, the first female three-time gold medalist, in the TV biopic “Wilma.” She also directed several episodes of the UPN sitcom “Moesha.”