The Board of Directors

Aya Ogawa is a multi-award-winning Brooklyn-based playwright, director, performer and translator whose work reflects an international viewpoint and utilizes the stage as a space for exploring cultural identity and the immigrant experience. Cumulatively, all aspects of their artistic practice synthesize their work as an artistic and cultural ambassador, building bridges across cultures to create me...

We invite you to this month’s International Directors’ Meet-Up, our monthly gathering of directors and theatre makers from around the world. It’s a space to share experiences, trade advice, and find support in what can often be a pretty isolating role. You can come and go as you need, drop in late, leave early, whatever fits your schedule. It’s simply a chance to set aside time each month to sit a...

Robby Lutfy (he/him) Sometimes an actor. Sometimes a producer. Mostly a director. Always an artist. He directs theatre at places like Cygnet Theatre, Marin Theatre Company, Milwaukee Repertory Theater, The John F Kennedy Center, and Burning Coal, etc. He was awarded the 2019 Craig Noel Award for Director of the Year. He was the 2012-2013 William R. Kenan, Jr. Directing Fellow at The John F. Kenned...

Irina is an award-winning multi-hyphenate theater maker whose various hats include director, scenographer, experience designer, professor, playwright, and artistic director. Raised in Moscow in an intercultural household with a Ukrainian mother and Georgian father, Irina creates work that grapples with social issues, exploring identity, displacement, and belonging. Since 2000, Irina has created ov...

We invite you to this month’s International Directors’ Meet-Up, our monthly gathering of directors and theatre makers from around the world. It’s a space to share experiences, trade advice, and find support in what can often be a pretty isolating role. You can come and go as you need, drop in late, leave early, whatever fits your schedule. It’s simply a chance to set aside time each month to sit a...

Bill Rauch is the inaugural artistic director of the Perelman Performing Arts Center. His work as a theater director has been seen nationwide, from low-income community centers to Broadway, including the Tony Award-winning production of Robert Schenkkan’s All The Way and its sequel, The Great Society. His New York credits also include the world premiere of Naomi Wallace’s Night Is A Room at Signat...

Tze Chien is a core member of The Finger Players and an award-winning playwright and director. He is the recipient of the Singapore Dramatist Award and multiple The Straits Times Life! Theatre Awards, with his play Oiwa: The Ghost of Yotsuya notably sweeping the awards, including Production of the Year and Best Director, in its year of presentation. His plays have been staged internationally, incl...

We invite you to this month’s International Directors’ Meet-Up, our monthly gathering of directors and theatre makers from around the world. It’s a space to share experiences, trade advice, and find support in what can often be a pretty isolating role. You can come and go as you need, drop in late, leave early, whatever fits your schedule. It’s simply a chance to set aside time each month to sit a...

Anne Hamburger is the Founding Artistic Director of En Garde Arts, which she established in 1986. Widely credited with pioneering the site-specific theatre movement in the United States, Hamburger has spent four decades redefining how and where performance happens, transforming city streets, historic landmarks, and public spaces into stages for ambitious, large-scale work. Under her leadership, En...

Bryan Doerries is a writer, director, and translator who currently serves as Artistic Director of Theater of War Productions, a company that presents charged performances of seminal texts, led by acclaimed actors, for audiences with something at stake to catalyze crucial dialogue about pressing, current issues. A self-described evangelist for ancient stories and their relevance to our lives today,...

We invite you to this month’s International Directors’ Meet-Up, our monthly gathering of directors and theatre makers from around the world. It’s a space to share experiences, trade advice, and find support in what can often be a pretty isolating role. You can come and go as you need, drop in late, leave early, whatever fits your schedule. It’s simply a chance to set aside time each month to sit a...

Mikhael Tara Garver is a pioneering force in immersive storytelling and fandom-driven experience design, shaping how audiences gather, participate, and imagine together at the intersection of live experience, technology, and culture. For over two decades, her work has brought thousands into transformative worlds inside rock clubs and national parks, international theme parks and stadiums, and even...

Matt Torney is an Irish-born theatre director and the Artistic Director of Theatrical Outfit in Atlanta, where he leads one of the Southeast’s most respected regional theatre companies, Theatrical Outfit. Originally from Belfast, Torney began his career as a freelance director in Ireland before moving to the United States in 2006 to complete an MFA in Directing at Columbia University. He has direc...

Adriana Baer has been an arts professional for over 20 years. She has held leadership roles at Profile Theatre (Executive Artistic Director) and Cutting Ball Theater (Associate Artistic Director), and has worked with companies including Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and Theatre Communications Group, the national service organization that works for a just and thriving the...

Lizards Lying in the Sun/Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol is a collective of artists. They work in theater, create books, radio programs, videos, and educational projects. Since 2003, they have been developing projects to connect work and life, to erase and redefine boundaries. Their work seeks to create narratives from real-life events. It has nothing to do with entertainment; it is a space to think, ar...

Brian Kulick is a director, writer, producer, educator, and current Chair of the Graduate Theatre Program at Columbia University. He has been the Artistic Director of Classic Stage Company, where he directed Galileo with F. Murray Abraham, The Tempest with Mandy Patinkin, and The Forest with Dianne Wiest. He commissioned and co-directed poet Anne Carson's award-winning An Oresteia , collabora...

Kareem Fahmy has directed and developed plays at theatres including MCC, The Atlantic, The New Group, Ensemble Studio Theatre, New Dramatists, The Civilians, Writers Theatre, Cincinnati Playhouse, Geva Theatre, Pioneer Theatre, The Magic, Contemporary American Theatre Festival, Berkeley Rep, and more. He is a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect. His plays, which include Fountains of Youth , Do...

Alvin Tan is the founder and artistic director of The Necessary Stage, one of Singapore’s most respected theatre companies, and the co–artistic director of the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival. A central figure in the evolution of devising in Singapore, he has directed more than one hundred productions presented across Asia, Europe and Australia, including cities such as Glasgow, Cairo, Busan, Melbour...

Suman Mukhopadhyay’s films deal with the socio-political realities and engage in a critical assessment of the contemporary. His explorations into the subaltern lives and histories have lent a distinction to his filmmaking and theatre productions.   Suman has directed nine full-length feature films, including Putulnacher Itikatha(2023), Nazarband (2020), Asamapta (2017), and Herbert (2005), which w...

Pirronne Yousefzadeh (She/Her/Hers) directs theatre that speaks to the moment and uplifts Global Majority communities with buoyancy, joy, and theatrical magic. She is a director, writer, and educator, serving as Associate Artistic Director and Director of Artistic Partnerships at the Playwrights’ Center. Previously, she served as the Producing Artistic Director at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Ce...

Acadia Barrengos (she/her) is a New York-based director whose work excavates lost histories and engages audiences viscerally. In addition to NYC, she has worked in Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and New Jersey. Inspired by the study of epigenetics, Acadia is driven by stories that wrestle with inheritance. Her work prioritizes surprise, ensemble, and rhythm. Ac...

Joe Deer is the award-winning director and choreographer of over 200 productions - from Off-Broadway to London, regional to summer stock, international, and university stages. His projects vary from new works in Matera, Italy, to operas, classic plays, and musicals at some of the world's finest theaters and training centers.  Joe is a former Chair and Artistic Director of the Department of Th...

Mei Ann Teo (they/them) is a queer immigrant from Singapore, an artistic leader, theatre maker, and educator whose work bridges the intersections of the artistic, the civic, and the contemplative. As a director, deviser, and dramaturg, Teo creates across genres, from music theatre and reimagined classics to intermedial participatory projects and documentary theatre, always with a deep curiosity fo...

In this episode, director and actor Shaun Patrick Tubbs joins us to talk about his journey through the worlds of theatre, opera, and new play development. This path has taken him from Wright State to Juilliard, from Miami to New York, from performing center stage to shaping stories from the director’s chair. Shaun’s directing work reflects a deep commitment to both craft and conscience. His produc...

Director, Professor, and writer Anne Bogart has led the Directing concentration at Columbia University's School of the Arts' Theatre program for over 30 years—almost as long as the concentration has been in existence.  While her reputation off-campus precedes her as the co-founder of the renowned SITI Theatre Company, which she founded with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki in 1992, and t...