Directing

Keelin Sanz discusses the development of WOMI, which she created to explore the healing capacity of art. By rooting WOMI in the work of choreographer Anna Halprin and memoirist Sarah Ramey, Sanz crafted a performance that worked to a mend the relationship between body and sense of self for those with chronic illnesses.

After directing Larissa FastHorse’s The Thanksgiving Play at her midwestern college, Indigenous theatremaker Sierra Rosetta traveled to New York to see the same play on Broadway. She discusses the way this milestone production—which made FastHorse the first known Native American woman playwright on Broadway—and her own work push for a future in which Native theatremakers’ presence on professional stages is standard, not novel.

The Latinx Theatre Commons announces the cohort of six directors, twenty-four designers, and seven scholars/documentarians selected for the Designer and Director Colaboratorio in Portland, Oregon this summer.

Alex Ates honors his mentor, the late director Maureen Shea, by sharing learnings from his time with her.

Director Vitaly Kogut is one of many displaced Russian men spending this winter in Batumi, Georgia. Daniel Mesta interviews him about his work, in which uses theatre to communicate the complexities of the Russian soul while enduring censorship and cancellation.

Jasmine Haley Anderson takes aim at fatphobic standards in the theatre industry, which begin fostering disordered eating in women from their earliest performance experiences.

Ann James sits down with Chelsey Morgan to discuss the way their background in multiple intimacy work methodologies informs their work as a facilitator, director, writer, and intimacy specialist. Across all their work, Chelsey curates a practice that individualizes approaches to intimacy based on the needs of both the actors and the story.

Michelle Haner interviews Moïse Touré, artistic director of Les Inachevés, about the company’s ongoing project on the theme of hospitality and the decision to reframe the company’s work as a laboratory.

In 2021, Nigerian director Josephine Awele Odunze directed a powerful production of Wedlock of the Gods by Zulu Sofola. Odunze sits down with Eseovwe Emakunu to discuss the play’s connections to issues Nigerian women face today, as well as her hopes that theatre can contribute to attaining true gender parity in Nigeria.

While performing across the West and in Africa, Misheck Mzumara noticed stark differences in typical audience behavior. He discusses those differences, their cultural contexts, and their impact on theatremakers’ experiences in cross-cultural theatre productions.

Glenn Davis, co-artistic director of Steppenwolf Theatre Company, sits down with Ken-Matt Martin, artistic director of Victory Gardens Theater, to talk about shifting relationships with donors, the concept of term limits for leadership, the joys of returning to rehearsal rooms, and their shared experiences as Black men at the helm of Chicago theatres.

Charlie Peters asks, “What if the role of a director was conceived primarily as one of listening rather than visioning?”