Ademola Wasiu Olalekan Bello, better known as Ademola Bello, is a Nigerian Playwright, Journalist and Novelist. (born January 31 1973 at St. Joan’s hospital in Ibadan western Nigeria). He is of Yoruba ancestry. He grew up in the city of Ibadan and Lagos. And his ancestral home is Ijebu Ode in Ogun State and is a member of the prominent Anikinaiya Ogbagba Royal Family on his maternal side.
He worked as a high school teacher and as a journalist in Nigeria. He is a former recipient of Nigeria’s distinguished National Youth Service Corps Merit Award for Community Service. He is currently a student at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
He earned an MFA in Dramatic Writing from prestigious New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he became the first African student in the Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing graduate program and he was a Dean’s Fellow. At NYU he studied playwriting with Arthur Kopit, Neil LaBute, Doug Wright, Janet Neipris, Len Jenkins, Martin Epstein, Gary Garrison, and Richard Wesley.
He holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in African History from University of Ibadan where he was the Editor-in Chief of the University Students’ Historical Press and his campus nickname was Demmy Bey. His play “The Black Cockerel” was produced in June 2009 at Out North Theater in Anchorage, Alaska with positive review in Anchorage Daily News. The play subsequently enjoyed impressive staged reading at Mark Taper Forum in Los-Angeles with great cast like Chiwetel Ejiofor, Chad Coleman and Joshua Malina. The play also had impressive staged reading in December 2009, at New York Theatre Workshop that is currently developing it for production. His new play “CHANGE” was presented as a staged reading by New York Theatre Workshop in April 2013.
Mr. Bello had received a Residency to Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference in Waterford, Connecticut. In 2001, he won both the Audience and Panelist Choice Awards at the Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez, Alaska for his play “The Blackguard Prince.” His other plays have had staged readings at New York Actors Studio, Lark Play Development Center, New York University, Frederick Loewe’s Room and New York Public Library.
He was profiled in 2001, alongside Edward Albee and John Guare, in American Theater Journal by late New York Times Cultural Critic Mel Gussow. He has also been profiled by Alaska Humanities Forum and Anchorage Daily News. Ademola Bello recently finished a part thriller and love story novel titled “The Prisoner from Cell 7.” He is a reporter at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, his articles have been published by Anchorage Press Newspaper, New York Amsterdam newspaper, RealClearWorld, Encyclopedia Britannica among others. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and has appeared as a guest on ESPN Outside the Lines.