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Jack Reuler

Jack Reuler (he/him) founded the Mixed Blood Theatre Company at the age of twenty-two, served as its artistic director until 2022, and is now its artistic director emeritus. Mixed Blood promotes successful pluralism, using theatre as a vehicle for artistry, entertainment, education, and effecting social change. He is a founder and co-president of the National New Play Network. Theatre Communications Group presented Jack with its Peter Zeisler Award for exemplifying pioneering practices in theatre, dedication to the freedom of expression, and being unafraid to take risks in the advancement of the art form. He was presented with the Ivey Award for Lifetime Achievement. He has also accepted Actors’ Equity’s first Rosetta LeNoire Award for “celebrating the universality of the human experience on the American stage.” Jack was named to Esquire magazine’s first “Register of People Under Forty Who Are Changing America” and received Macalester College’s Distinguished Citizen Award, the City’s Minneapolis Award, and MCTC’s Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award.

a large group posing for a photo
From Nicety to Necessity
Essay

From Nicety to Necessity

21 October 2020

Jack Reuler, artistic director of Minneapolis’s Mixed Blood Theatre, reflects on how the pandemic might just be the great equalizer in the American theatre and how it’s time for theatre to move from being something nice to being something necessary.

At the Crossroads of Disability and Theatre at Mixed Blood
Essay

At the Crossroads of Disability and Theatre at Mixed Blood

18 December 2017

Jack Reuler discusses nearly two decades of incorporating work about, for, or with people with disabilities or on issues of disability at Mixed Blood Theatre.

Colleagues, Counselors, and Confidants
Essay

Colleagues, Counselors, and Confidants

Theatre Critics of the Twin Cities

18 September 2016

Mixed Blood Artistic Director Jack Reuler reflects on his longstanding relationships with the theatre critics of the Twin Cities: Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Minnesota.

AD 111
Essay

AD 111

Frosh Bites—Eleventy-One Nuggets for Being a Successful and Ethical Artistic Director​

2 February 2016

February 2 marks forty years since then twenty-two-year-old Mixed Blood Artistic Director Jack Reuler sat down to write the original mission and primary objectives for Mixed Blood. Jack commemorates that founding by presenting a list of qualities and practices for successful and ethical artistic leaders.

Radical Hospitality in Conversation
Essay

Radical Hospitality in Conversation

Mixed Blood Theatre and Pillsbury House Theatre

17 June 2015

Mixed Blood Artistic Director Jack Reuler talks to Pillsbury House Theatre Co-Artistic Directors Faye Price and Noël Raymond about the successes and challenges of removing cost as a barrier to theatre attendance. 

Mixed Blood Theatre’s Disability Visibility Project
Essay

Mixed Blood Theatre’s Disability Visibility Project

27 May 2015

Aditi Brennan Kapil and Jack Reuler of Mixed Blood Theatre share the Disability Visibility project with hopes of improving the relationship between the American theatre and disability.

Aditi Kapil, Jack Reuler, and a Pack of Skittles at Mixed Blood Theatre
Essay

Aditi Kapil, Jack Reuler, and a Pack of Skittles at Mixed Blood Theatre

6 August 2014

Hayley Finn interviews Aditi Kapil, Mellon Playwright-in-Residence at Mixed Blood Theatre, and Jack Reuler, Mixed Blood’s Artistic Director, to discuss how their relationship has changed as a result of the residency.

Radical Hospitality
Essay

Radical Hospitality

The Artistic Case

27 November 2013

This initial conversation between Artistic Director Jack Reuler and Playwright-in-Residence Aditi Brennan Kapil examines the artistic case for a theatre in Minneapolis to charge no admission, program ambitious new work that stretches its aesthetics, capacity, and resources, and perhaps more importantly, why this matters?

A brick building with a sign that reads "mixed blood."
Interview with Jack Rueler
Essay

Interview with Jack Rueler

6 March 2012

This interview is adapted from the version that appears in Counting New Beans: Intrinsic Impact and the Value of Art. Jack Reuler of Mixed Blood Theatre talks about the new metrics of measuring the impact of theatre.

In Search of the Artistic Home
Essay

In Search of the Artistic Home

15 February 2012

Jamie Gahlon has asked theatre artists from around the country to talk about their personal search for an artistic home. Jack Reuler continues this series.