Herb Newsome is an actor/ writer/ director out of New York City. He has been acting since he was a little boy appearing in the films The Brother From Another Planet, The Pick Up Artist and the Off-Broadway play Black Girl, staring Angela Basett, at the Second Stage Theater. After studying theater as a child in New York he received his BA in Theater From the University at Albany and his MFA in Acting from Penn State . Since then he has appeared across the country in Fences at Pennsylvania Centerstage, Jitney at the Elmwood Playhouse, A Raisin in the Sun at Fresno City Theater, Oleon & On at the DAP Ensemble, Obsidian at Centerstage NY, The Meeting and God’s Trombones with The Loaves and Fish Repertory Company,  News to Me at the Hartbeat Ensemble, Take Me Out at the Foothills Theater, News To Me and Plays in the Park with the HartBeat Ensemble, Revenge of a King at multiple venues across the country, and Macbeth and Richard III at the Colorado Shakepeare Festival just to name a few. Recently he had a premiere of his new one-man show Freeman In Paris at the New Horizon Theater in Pittssburgh. Since graduate school he has added playwright and director to his resume as well.

As a writer he has penned the solo show In Devil’s Heaven which he performed at The Manhattan Theater Source in NYC. Following that he wrote Revenge of a King, a hip-hop musical based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet which has been produced multiple times including the New York International Fringe Festival and the National Black Theater Festival in Winston-Salem, N.C. and the Cincinnati Black Theater and the Black Theater Troupe in Pheonix, which has been invited to perform the show at the 2009 National Black Theater Festival. His latest writing effort is the one man show titled FreeMan in Paris, which chronicles the life of Carter Freeman, a jazz trumpet player born out of the bebop era.

            As a director, he had directed Revenge of a King for the NY International Fringe Festival, the national tour of Roll of Thunder Hear, My Cry for the National Theater of Arts and Education, Forgivable Sins, a finalist at the Samuel French One Act Festival in NYC and Sing Black Hammer and Journey of the Spirits at the Kuntu Repertory Theater in Pittsburgh. Herb currently serves as the Managing Director for the Loaves and Fish Repertory Theater and is a founding Member of  the standard an artist collective in NYC.