NIKKI LYNETTE is a suicide survivor and multi-hyphenate artist who fuses
mental health activism into her performance art, film projects and visual art,
creating a lane that is uniquely her own. Her journey with mental health
outreach began in 2016 when she returned to the public eye after a long
hiatus with a confession: she’d secretly been battling mental health issues. In
a time when being open about mental health struggles was taboo, Nikki
began writing articles about depression and suicide for prominent media like
Afropunk and AllHipHop. As the opening act for Pussy Riot’s first American
tour, Nikki workshopped the material that would soon become her musical
about depression, GET OUT ALIVE. In 2019, Nikki made history as the first
black female playwright to have a musical produced by American Music
Theatre Project, in 2022 she became the first Steppenwolf LookOut Series
work and first female AMTP alum to be featured at NAMT’s Festival of New
Musicals, and in 2024 Nikki Lynette became the first American Playwright to
be invited to Cove Park’s Musical Theatre Writing Residency in Scotland. GET
OUT ALIVE is currently in development under the guidance of Tony &
Grammy Award winning producers Octopus Theatricals. A proud ambassador
and board member for the Chicago chapter of the National Alliance on Mental
Illness (NAMI), seeing her music used to tell stories in tv shows led Nikki to an
interest in filmmaking. Since adapting her musical about depression to film
during the pandemic, GET OUT ALIVE has been invited into over a dozen film
festivals and won three awards. Her zeal for crafting edgy multimedia
theatrical experiences that center mental health is on full display in Nikki
Lynette’s second film, the new documusical entitled Happy Songs About
Unhappy Things.