Joniece Abbott-Pratt
Joniece Abbott-Pratt is an American actress and audiobook narrator, whose narrations have won her 14 Earphones Awards from AudioFile. Along with co-narrators, she also won the 2022 Audie Award for Short Stories or Collections for ''Blackout.''
Education and career
Abbott-Pratt was raised in Philadelphia. She earned a bachelor's degree at Clark Atlanta University, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in acting from the University of Iowa. While at Iowa she appeared in a 2004 hip-hop adaptation of the Greek tragedy Seven Against Thebes, and in a 2005 production of Suzan-Lori Parks' In the Blood, directed by Tisch Jones.Abbott-Pratt has performed in numerous regional theater productions, as well as on television shows. In 2002, she was a teen actress in Kia Corthron's Breath, Boom in Atlanta. In 2009, she co-starred in Tracey Scott Wilson's The Good Negro in Hartford and New York.
In 2013 she co-starred in a production of Lydia R. Diamond's Stick Fly in Philadelphia. In 2014 she appeared in Marcus Gardley's The House that Will Not Stand in New Haven. She has appeared in several plays by August Wilson, including Gem of the Ocean with Novella Nelson and Stephen Tyrone Williams in Hartford in 2011, and Seven Guitars in Louisville in 2015. Also in 2015, she co-starred with Keith Randolph Smith in Dominique Morisseau's Sunset Baby, and with Royce Johnson in Katori Hall's The Mountaintop. In 2019 she starred in Too Heavy for Your Pocket, a drama about the Freedom Riders by Jireh Breon Holder, at the George Street Playhouse in New Jersey.
Abbott-Pratt is an adjunct instructor in drama at New York University.
Awards and honors
Abbott-Pratt was named "Best Emerging Actress" in 2003, by the Atlanta Constitution. In 2020, AudioFile included Abbott-Pratt's narration of Jordan Ifueko's Raybearer on their list of the best young adult audiobooks of the year, and in 2021, they included her narration of Ifueko's Redemptor on their list of the best young adult audiobooks of the year.In 2022, AudioFile and Literary Hub named Abbott-Pratt's narration of Nightcrawling among the best fiction audiobooks of the year.