Mary Powell Burrill was born on August 30, 1881, in Washington D.C. She graduated from M Street High School, where she had a romantic relationship with fellow student Angelina Weld Grimke. In 1904, Burrill graduated from Emerson College. Beginning in 1905, Burrill taught high school in Washington, D.C. Burrill was a playwright and director of plays and musicals. She wrote several well-known plays about gender and racial justice.  

Burrill met Lucy Diggs Slowe in 1912. A few years later, Slowe moved to Washington, D.C., with Burrill. They later purchased a home and lived together for the rest of their lives. Burrill was a teacher at Dunbar High School and Armstrong High School, but also was a playwright who tackled issues of racism and gender inequality. She was active in the Black literary and artistic community in Washington, D.C. She interacted with prominent writers, artists, and poets who were famous for their roles in the cultural renaissance of the New Negro Movement (later known as the Harlem Renaissance). Slowe and Burrill were both founders of the National Council for Negro Women in 1935. 

After Slowe passed away in 1937, Burrill moved out of their house and into an apartment. Burrill retired in 1944 and passed away on March 13, 1946, in New York City. 

For more on Burrill, see Genny Beemyn, A Queer Capital: A History of Gay Life in Washington DC (New York: Routledge, 2014); Carroll L. L. Miller and Anne S. Pruitt-Logan, Faithful to the Task at Hand: The Life of Lucy Diggs Slowe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012); Wendy Rouse, Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Suffrage Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2022). For an OutHistory exhibit that addresses Burrill, see The Queer History of Women’s Suffrage: Scholarship and Censorship in 2025, by Wendy Rouse.