The core mission of Lorraine Hansberry Theatre (LHT) is to promote the performing arts.

LHT presents plays by America's foremost African-American and multicultural playwrights; provides employment and career-building opportunities for actors, directors, designers, and technicians; and fosters youth development and education through community outreach. LHT distinguishes itself as an eclectic learning community, sustained by both rigor and creativity.  LHT draws from aesthetic, cultural and economic resources of the San Francisco Bay Area to enrich and strengthen the performing arts. Founded in 1981 in San Francisco, the theatre was named after Lorraine Hansberry, an American playwright whose "A Raisin in the Sun" (1959) was the first drama by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway. LHT has produced more than 130 plays, including west coast and world premieres, experimental works, classics in the African-American canon, lively musicals, and poignant socio-political dramas. LHT's presentations range from the works of Nobel Laureates Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, and Toni Morrison to Pulitzer Prize-winning writers Charles Fuller, Alice Walker and August Wilson; to large-scale musicals celebrating Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Lester Young, Fats Waller, Eubie Blake and others; to award winning dramas by James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and our namesake Lorraine Hansberry; to pioneering experimental theatre artists Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange and Maria Irene Fornes, and new works by Robert Alexander, Roger Guenveur Smith, David Rousseve, Prince Gomolvilas, among others.