“The thing that I remember the most was that she was very much involved in theater and musical theater at Harvard,” Porter-Lipscomb adds. “She’s got a wonderful musical theater voice.”

ACTING OUT

Banks-Johnson says theatrics are the most memorable parts of her Harvard experience.

“I met some amazingly talented people and I had a lot of fun working on various productions,” she says.

Banks-Johnson says, among other productions, she held a lead role in the musical The Gentlemen of Verona which was staged right in Harvard Yard, as well as two productions on the main stage at the Loeb Theater.

Banks-Johnson also performed in a BlackCAST production of Ellington at Eight her senior year and served as the organization’s treasurer “probably in my junior year,” she says.

Despite her heavy involvement in theater groups at Harvard, Banks-Johnson ultimately decided to enter, in her professional career, the much more stable world of production, working behind—rather than on—the stage.

“I had always given a lot of thought to trying to pursue some kind of career in college, but I think the practical side of me won out,” she says. “I’m just too concerned about security to go into that so I opted for something that was somewhat more stable but still gave me the same excitement of being in a production, so that’s why I went into TV production.”

Upon graduation from the College, Banks-Johnson stayed in Cambridge working for WGBH Channel 2, first as an intern and then as a producer for the documentary series “Frontline.” Starting out as a production assistant, she quickly worked her way up to post-production supervisor.

But “finally when I got to be 30 [years old] I realized that I had lived in a circle of about 20 miles my whole life. I decided that I wanted to see what it was like to live somewhere else,” she recalls.

In 1988, Banks-Johnson hopped onto a plane to Los Angeles, Calif. where she spent the next five years.

In Los Angeles, she worked on production for the PBS documentary series “Power in the Pacific” and subsequently for “The Quiz Kids Challenge,” a quiz show that pit adults of average intelligence against very intelligent children. She also had stints at talk shows hosted by Montel Williams and later Vicki Lawrence.

“I was freelancing and trying to find my niche,” Banks-Johnson says of her time on the West Coast.

She finally found her calling when, in 1993, she learned of an opening at the Oprah Winfrey Show. She got the job, and in 1993 moved to Chicago to work as an associate producer for Oprah.

Banks-Johnson is currently the post-production producer, which has her overseeing the production of the show.