Ricardo Khan

Khan and his siblings were also involved in a number of youth groups growing up, including the Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, Little League Baseball, the black church and the YMCA, and the South Jersey chapter of Jack & Jill, a mothers-led black organization dedicated to exposing their children to education, advocacy, arts and culture, the importance of self-awareness and a life of giving back.

Shortly after that, he became active in his high school drama department, a decision that would set in motion a life course of using the arts and the power of live performance as his tool for prompting social change and the development of a mutual respect and understanding among peoples of differing backgrounds in this society and the world.

During his tenure the company introduced several revolutionary American plays, including works by August Wilson, George C. Wolfe, Rita Dove, Mbongeni Ngema, Harold Scott, Ruby Dee and Ntozake Shange.

"[1] In December 1999, Khan left his company to begin a one-year sabbatical in Trinidad and Tobago, his father's birthplace, which later took him to South Africa in search of a new, more global language and way of addressing the African American experience and attendant psycho-sociological challenges of trying to live a free life while black in America.

He also lived for periods of time in Trinidad and South Africa, and started an international collective of writers called The World Theatre Lab, based simultaneously in New York, London and Johannesburg.

But it was originally inspired years before by the stories Khan heard of the Tuskegee Airmen of Work War II, upon which he developed the pay, Black Eagles, in 1989 at Crossroads with playwright Leslie Lee.

[2] But after the 2009 inauguration of President Barack H. Obama where the Tuskegee Airmen were honored as special guests[4][8]., Khan and Ellis incorporated that historic event and developed their script into a full-length play for all ages, which premiered in the fall of 2009 at Crossroads.

[8] Its 2017 New York staging, a co-production between Crossroads, the Pasadena Playhouse and the New Victory Theatre in NY was nominated for eight 2018 NAACP Theater Awards, winning three: Best Production, Best Lighting and Best Choreography.

In 2015, Khan conceived of a multi-narrative play, Freedom Rider, which evolved into an extraordinary collaboration with four other writers, Kathleen McGhee-Anderson, Murray Horwitz, Nathan Louis Jackson and Nikkole Salter, involving an interracial group of college students on a bus headed south in 1961.

In 2016 Khan served as producer and director of the highly acclaimed opening night gala ceremonies for the Smithsonian's new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC on September 24 of that year, involving performers and creatives that included Yolanda Adams, Daniel Beaty, Dave Chappelle and Frederic Yonnet, Ava DuVernay, Savion Glover, Oprah Winfrey and Stevie Wonder.