Joshua William Gelb is a theater director, performer, designer, and creative technologist. During the COVID shutdown, Gelb founded the Obie and Drama League Award-winning digital performance laboratory Theater in Quarantine (TiQ), live-streaming dozens of original projects from his East Village closet to TiQ’s YouTube channel. Embracing 21st-century solutions to the question "what is theatrical?" TiQ quickly became a leading practitioner of live-stream digital performance, earning a New York Times cover story by chief theater critic Jesse Green, who praised it as "the best argument by far for the artistic promise of streaming theater," noting its "weirdness, humor, gravitas, intellectual curiosity, graphic boldness, and electric vitality." In its initial pandemic season alone, TiQ was presented by The Invisible Dog, New Georges, A2SF, Theater Mitu, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, CultureHub, Exponential Festival, and CulturalDC, was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, and included in Vulture’s “Top 10 Best Theater Moments of 2020” and the Times' “Best Theater of 2021.” TiQ’s work has been featured in several books, including Theater of Lockdown and Pandemic Performance. The complete TiQ archive was recently included in the Library of Congress but can still be viewed for free on its YouTube channel.
Once theaters reopened, Gelb premiered TiQ’s “live & in-person” hybrid format at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and continues to create work for both remote and in-person audiences, including Nosferatu: A 3D Symphony of Horror, commissioned by NYU Skirball, and the re-envisioned The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy, co-created with Sinking Ship Productions and presented at the Under the Radar Festival in a co-pro with NYTW and Lucille Lortel Theater. Gelb’s HERE Arts Center HARP residency recently culminated in the premiere of Untitled Miniature, a durational hybrid performance staged inside a box measuring just 36” x 19.5”.
Before the pandemic, Gelb created a musical interrogation of the 1927 Al Jolson film The Jazz Singer in residence at Abrons Arts Center as well as the sesquicentennial reimagining of America’s supposed first musical The Black Crook, about which he has lectured at Harvard University's Houghton Library. His adaptation of Kafka’s A Hunger Artist, developed with Sinking Ship Productions, continues to tour nationally and internationally. Gelb received his BFA from NYU Tisch’s Playwrights Horizons Theater School, his MFA in directing from Carnegie Mellon’s School of Drama, where he graduated as a John Wells Fellow, and was a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab and the Playwrights Horizons New Media Lab.
