which continues to enthrall audiences today. Set in Seattle, “Grey’s Anatomy” chronicles the life of Dr. Meredith Grey and the community of health care professionals and patients at the hospital where she works. The wildly popular show has been a network television staple for 22 seasons and is ABC’s longest-running scripted primetime show. Allen has been instrumental in the show’s success, serving as executive producer for more than 200 episodes and director for 43 episodes. Since 2011, Debbie Allen has also appeared as an actor in almost 100 episodes, portraying Dr. Catherine Fox Avery, a complicated urologist and philanthropist who is mother to one of the hospital’s chief doctors and eventually engineers the purchase of the hospital where her son and Grey work. Allen soars in the role, where she is frequently tasked with showing multiple sides of humanity, portraying her character as a brilliant surgeon, a nurturing parent, a manipulative lover, and an ambitious and controlling matriarch. Her work on the show earned her a NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series. This year, the show has been renewed for a 23rd season, with Allen returning to serve as executive producer. While it is impossible to pigeonhole Allen in racial terms, she certainly hasn’t shirked from using her talent and industry influence to bring visibility to the triumphs and tragedies of the experience of African descendants in America. She portrayed Alex Haley’s wife Nannie in “Roots: The Next Generation” and served as producer and director of “One Day,” a television movie chronicling the life of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (LLD ’57). She also directed the music video for the 1990 rendition of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” the Negro National
Anthem. In 1986, as King’s birthday became a national holiday, she gave an incredibly moving nationally televised song and dance performance embodying the persona of Coretta Scott King, using her artistry to demonstrate the determination, pain, and sacrifice of the civil rights heroine. Perhaps most notably, Allen worked for years to bring “Amistad” to movie theaters around the world, showing the horrors of the Middle Passage and American slavery through the eyes of Africans abducted from their native land and brought to the United States on the slave ship La Amistad. The captured Africans eventually win their freedom. Allen worked for nearly two decades to produce the movie, enlisting the legendary Steven Spielberg as director and co-producer after fighting for years to get Hollywood to greenlight the project, which no studio would initially back. The film received critical praise and generated multiple Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. After so many studios refused to make the film, the acclaim vindicated Allen’s tenacity. She returned to Howard to screen the film before its wide release and had some honest words to share with the Cramton Auditorium audience. “I was so angry, so outraged, I was going to slap somebody,” said Allen to the audience, according to The Hilltop. “I couldn’t believe that so blatantly they thought this was unimportant.’’ Years later, Allen is still extremely proud of the movie. She is also still astounded that it took so long to make, and even more astounded that it took her so long to even hear about the story. She told Howard Magazine that the spark to create the movie came after a visit to Howard. “History was my most loved subject,” she said. “It was what I love more than anything, which is why I was devastated when I went to the Howard University Bookstore and bought a collection of essays by Black academicians, politicians, and religious leaders. The Amistad story was told in the preface of the book, and it was a story I was never taught in school. And I was determined to make it a movie, and that’s what happens when I’m determined. I don’t quite give up. It took, like, 18 years to get it done, but that sense of our lineage is our connection to who we are today to each other and to this country. This is our country. It’s been my life’s work to be connected and to teach. So ‘Amistad’ was a result of my love for history and books and Howard University.” It takes imagination to envision a form of creativity Allen hasn’t tackled. In addition to dancing and acting, she released two vocal solo albums, 1986’s “Sweet Charity” and 1989’s “Special Look.” She provided the voice for Suga Mama’s cousin Myrtle in the animated show, “The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder.” Allen has been nominated for two Tony Awards, three
Golden Globe Awards, and 22 Emmy Awards. She won five Emmys for choreography and production and earned a Golden Globe for acting. She has five NAACP Image Awards and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She is also one of the fewer than 25 people to win the Governor’s Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, joining the likes of icons like Johnny Carson and Bob Hope for making “a profound, transformational, and long-lasting contribution to the arts and/or science of television.” The accolades don’t stop there. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that Allen will receive an honorary Oscar in November 2025, along with Tom Cruise, Dolly Parton, and Wynn Thomas, for her five decades as a movie choreographer, actor, and producer. The Howard alumna was a 2020 Kennedy Center Honoree, widely considered to be America’s highest artistic recognition, who the center described as a “multi-disciplinary artist, choreographer, and actress,” who “moves seamlessly through artistic disciplines and is a cultural ambassador for all.” Allen has served as an artist-in-residence at the center for more than 15 years. Allen has given to the world in so many ways through her impact on culture, but she has also found other ways to make a difference. She helped set Howard’s governing direction as a member of the Board of Trustees from 1998-2004 and again from 2011-2017. For decades, she and sister Phylicia Rashad have funded a scholarship for a Howard student in the name of her father. Chosen by Rashad and Allen directly, recipients include students who are “triple threat” performers who, like Allen and Rashad, can sing, act, and dance, such as Taraji P. Henson (BFA ’95, DHL ’22), who would go on earn a Golden Globe Award and star in hit movies and television shows such as “Baby Boy,” “Empire, “Hustle & Flow,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “Hidden Figures,” and “The Color Purple,” and Wendy Raquel Robinson (BFA ’89), who would become an NAACP Image Award Winner and star in “The Steve Harvey Show,” “The Game,” and a host of other productions. In 2025, the award was presented to Howard student Trinity Garrison live on NBC’s “The Today Show” by Rashad and Henson. She also has a school of her own, the Debbie Allen Dance Academy, which she co-founded with her husband Norm Nixon. Along with Allen’s daughter Vivian Nixon Williams, who serves as the program’s executive director, the academy focuses on enriching lives through the arts, with a special focus on disenfranchised Black and Latino communities. The academy also runs the Debbie Allen Middle School, a private school for aspiring young dancers in grades six to Overcoming is not a journey. It is a destination.
LEFT: Mattel’s Debbie Allen Tribute Barbie Doll RIGHT: Allen directs a movie for Disney. Photo courtesy Debbie Allen.
eight designed to foster a lifelong love of learning through quality training in academics, dance, and theatre arts. Young people are important to Allen, but so are older aspiring dancers. She created a program which resulted in a concert featuring 60 to 90-year-olds. She also created a program for cancer patients, and after the 2025 rash of fires in California, she started “Dancing in the Light,” which brought communities back together through dance. Ultimately, she said, she just goes where she sees the need. At age 75, when you have made your mark in as many different roles, genres, stages, platforms, and screens as Allen, what’s next? New challenges, of course! In addition to her work on “Grey’s Anatomy,” Playbill has reported that she will direct Cedric the Entertainer and Henson in a production of August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” on Broadway in 2026. She’s working on a project to direct and choreograph a stage version of Disney’s film “Polly,” which she also directed. She’ll also be seen starring in the soon-to- be released films “Silent Rhythm” and “Splinter.” “What drives me is the opportunity to be creative in a new realm,” she said. Allen is also slated to produce a pilot for an “A Different World” reboot on Netflix. While in D.C. to scout talent for the show this year, she chose a familiar setting for the auditions: the Ira Aldridge stage where she came into her own as a world-class performer. Even after she has accomplished so much, Allen is still looking for her next opportunity. In the documentary, “Seen and Heard: The History of Black Television,” streaming on HBO Max, she explained why. “Overcoming is not a journey,” she said. “It is a destination.”
ALL IN THE FAMILY (l to r): Former Dean Phylicia Rashad, mother and Pulitizer Prize nominee Vivian Ayers, and Debbie Allen. Photo courtesy Debbie Allen.
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Howard Magazine
Fall 2025
Fall 2025
Howard Magazine
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