Biography
Richard Wesley is an American playwright and screenwriter. Born on 11 July 1945 in Newark, New Jersey, he studied playwriting at Howard University, graduating in 1967.
His early plays include The Black Terror (1971), which won a Drama Desk Award, and The Mighty Gents (1978), which had a Broadway run. He wrote the screenplay for the 1974 film Uptown Saturday Night, starring Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby. Wesley has also written teleplays for television films including Murder Without Motive (1992) and Mandela and De Klerk (1997), and contributed to the anthology series Fallen Angels (1993). He is an associate professor and former chair of dramatic writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
