Marquis D. Gibson is thrilled to be joining the Columbia OHMA family. He is an actor, writer, bookseller, and historical interpreter based in New York City and originally from Durham, NC. Marquis has performed in productions across the country and on Broadway, was selected as one of 10 playwrights for the Say Gay Plays inaugural fundraiser in 2024 and portrays patients and clients in medical and law schools to train future medical and legal practitioners.
Marquis has worked as a bookseller and former children’s book buyer with independent, Black owned and/or queer/leftist bookstores and is currently a 2026-27 mentee with the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America mentorship program in order to archive Black and queer book collections. He works as a historical interpreter with the New York Historical, bringing to life moments of New York history centered on Black and marginalized people’s histories. Marquis’ research interests’ include bridging theatre performance with stories around death and dying as a human experience and death as a practice i.e. funerary rituals, memory preservation; the art of drag storytelling, particularly lip-syncing, to reproduce stories of everyday Black and brown queer people; and book and ephemera collectors as living archives.
