Katori Hall is the creator, showrunner, executive producer and writer of the STARZ original series P-Valley, which made a huge splash with its first season premiere last July and quickly becoming a major critical and audience hit for the network. The series—which was immediately renewed for a second season, now filming—is produced by Lionsgate Television, with whom Hall subsequently signed her first overall deal last December. Under the new deal, she will continue to executive produce P-Valley and also develop and produce new scripted content across Lionsgate broadcast, cable and streaming platforms.
P-Valley—based on Hall’s acclaimed play Pussy Valley—focuses on the lives of strip club dancers working in the Dirty Delta of Mississippi. In creating the show, Hall made it a priority to hire a team that represented, both onscreen and off, the same diversity she aims to depict in the series, including a writers room made up almost entirely of women, including people of color and LGBTQ+ writers, as well as a diverse set of all women directors, and multiple women and people of color as department heads. P-Valley also has no shortage of breakthrough performances, with star-making turns from Nicco Annan, Brandee Evans, J. Alphonse Nicholson, Elarica Johnson and more.
Hall's groundbreaking work on Season 1 led to the series being named to countless ‘Best of 2020’ lists including Entertainment Weekly, Hollywood Reporter, Indiewire, New York Times, New Yorker, NPR, Time Magazine, TV Guide, Variety, Vulture, and more. It also received nominations from the Gotham Awards; Film Independent Spirit Awards; an ‘Outstanding Drama Series’ nomination from the GLAAD Media Awards; and six NAACP Image Award nominations, including two for Hall in the ‘Outstanding Breakthrough Creative (Television)’ and ‘Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series’ categories.
The past year, Hall also received two Tony Award nominations for ‘Best Musical’ and ‘Best Book of a Musical’ as a producer and the writer of the smash hit Broadway musical, Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, which received 12 nominations overall.
Currently, Katori appears as a talking head in HBO’s hit documentary film, Tina, offering her unique observations on the legacy of the icon alongside such contributing luminaries as Oprah Winfrey, Angela Bassett, and more. Her upbringing in the same Memphis area where Tina Turner came of age greatly informed Katori’s writing of the musical, and her observations throughout the documentary further confirm how beautifully she connected with Turner’s life story. Unsurprisingly, she brings the same authenticity to her work on P-Valley.
A renowned playwright, Katori won an Olivier Award in 2010 for ‘Best New Play’ for The Mountaintop, which fictionalizes the last night in Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and is based on her own mother's experiences in Memphis during that time. The play opened Broadway in October 2011 in a production that memorably starred Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett.
