Dawn Monique Williams | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | July 2, 1978 |
| Occupation | Theatre Director |
Dawn Monique Williams (born July 2, 1978) is an American theatre director. She was born in Oakland, California, United States, and is a graduate of California State University, Hayward (BA Theatre Arts, 2003), San Francisco State University (MA Drama, 2007) and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2011.
Born in Oakland in 1978, to a white mother and black father, Williams attended Berkeley High School and appears in the PBS Frontline special, School Colors, about racial politics at Berkeley High School 40 years after Brown v. Board of Education. [1] Williams participated in school productions of Day of Absence , A Chorus Line , The Colored Museum , and The Wiz . She directed her first play, Eugène Ionesco's The Lesson , at 15 while a student at BHS.
In 2016, Williams was awarded a Princess Grace Foundation, [2] (USA) Fellowship award in theatre. This Fellowship will support her 2017 production of Merry Wives of Windsor, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. From 2014-2016 Williams was in residence at OSF on a Leadership U Grant administered through the Theatre Communications Group and funded by the Mellon Foundation. Williams served as the 2013 Phil Killian Directing Fellow at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, [3] which is home to America's first practical Elizabethan Stage. Williams was a 2011 Directing Fellow of the Drama League of New York, [4] one of four directors selected for the fall Directors' Project. She was Resident Director for the now defunct Aces Wild Theatre, a touring company regularly taking productions to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Her production of Lisa D'Amour's Anna Bella Eema traveled to the Fringe in 2008, and a production of Shakespeare's The Tempest played the festival in August 2010. She is the former Associate Artistic Director for Berkeley's Impact Theatre. [5]
Williams spent several years as an adjunct faculty member in the Theatre and Dance Department at California State University, East Bay where, in November 2012, she directed the U.S. English premiere of the award-winning play NN12, by Gracia Morales. [6] [7] A poet, author, and scholar, frequently lecturing on contemporary Shakespeare performance, Williams contributed to Shakespeare, Race, and Performance: The Diverse Bard (2016), edited by Delia Jarrett-Macauley. [8] [9]
In addition to her work with Aces, and Impact, Williams has worked at Woman's Will, Hampshire Shakespeare Company, the Hayward Greek Festival, the San Francisco Young Playwrights Festival, California Conservatory Theatre, Chester Theatre, New World Theater and has assisted at the leading regional theatres Oregon Shakespeare Festival (Ashland, Oregon), Hartford Stage (Hartford, Connecticut), Shakespeare & Company (Lenox, Massachusetts), TheatreWorks (Palo Alto, California), and California Shakespeare Theater (Berkeley, California). Her passion is Shakespearean classics, heightened language plays, and magic/heightened realism, which is evident in these select directing credits: The Winter’s Tale , Twelfth Night , Much Ado About Nothing , Scapin the Cheat, Sleepy, Steel Magnolias , Children of Eden , The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee , Little Shop of Horrors, The Burial at Thebes , My California , Medea, Trojan Women, In the Blood, and La Ronde.
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) is a regional repertory theatre in Ashland, Oregon, United States, founded in 1935 by Angus L. Bowmer. The Festival now offers matinee and evening performances of a wide range of classic and contemporary plays not limited to Shakespeare. During the Festival, between five and eleven plays are offered in daily rotation six days a week in its three theatres. It welcomed its millionth visitor in 1971, its 10-millionth in 2001, and its 20-millionth visitor in 2015.
Ben Iden Payne, also known as B. Iden Payne, was an English actor, director and teacher. Active in professional theater for seventy years, he helped the first modern Repertory Theatre in the United Kingdom, was an early and effective advocate for Elizabethan staging of Shakespeare plays, and served as an inspiration for Shakespeare Companies and University theater programs throughout North America and the British Isles. His name lives on as the name of a theater at the University of Texas as well as annual theater awards presented in Austin, Texas.
The San Jose Repertory Theatre was the first resident professional theatre company in San Jose, California. It was founded in 1980 by James P. Reber. In 2008, after the demise of the American Musical Theatre of San Jose, the San Jose Rep became the largest non-profit, professional theatre company in the South Bay with an annual operating budget of $5 million. In 2006, it was saved from impending insolvency by a $2 million bailout loan from the city of San Jose; this was later restructured into a long-term loan similar to a mortgage.
Karen Grassle is an American actress, known for her role as Caroline Ingalls in the NBC television drama series Little House on the Prairie.
Elizabeth Rex is a play by Timothy Findley. It premiered in a 2000 production by the Stratford Festival. The play won the 2000 Governor General's Award for English language drama.
Gretchen Hoyt Corbett is an American actress and theater director. She is primarily known for her roles in television, particularly as attorney Beth Davenport on the NBC series The Rockford Files, but has also had a prolific career as a stage actress on Broadway as well as in regional theater.
Mary Zimmerman is an American theatre and opera director and playwright from Nebraska. She is an ensemble member of the Lookingglass Theatre Company, the Manilow Resident Director at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Illinois, and also serves as the Jaharis Family Foundation Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University.
Libby Appel served as the fourth artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) from 1995 to June 2007. Appel directed more than 25 productions at OSF, and her artistic vision influenced the 11 plays presented each year during her tenure. Despite the festival's name, she placed increased emphasis on new works. “We have made major connections with world playwrights, artists whose voices we’re particularly interested in.” Appel said. “We commission playwrights, we develop plays here; we have playwrights in residence. We’re a world force now, and I’m really proud of that.”
Lillian Groag is an Argentine-American playwright, theater director, and actress. Her plays include The Ladies of the Camellias, The Magic Fire, and The White Rose.
Tony Taccone is an American theater director, and the former artistic director of Berkeley Repertory Theatre in Berkeley, California.
Ruined (2008) is an American play by Lynn Nottage. The play premiered at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, and won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play explores the plight of women during the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
California Shakespeare Theater is a regional theater located in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Its performance space, the Lt. G. H. Bruns III Memorial Amphitheater, is located in Orinda, while the administrative offices, rehearsal hall, costume and prop shop are located in Berkeley.
Daniel Fish is an American theater director based in New York City.
A Shakespeare festival is a theatre organization that stages the works of William Shakespeare continually.
Keith Franklin Fowler was an American actor, director, producer, and educator. He was a professor of drama and former head of directing in the Drama Department of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts of the University of California, Irvine (UCI), and the artistic director of two LORT/Equity theaters.
Jonathan Moscone is an American theater director, and currently the Executive Director of the California Arts Council under Governor Gavin Newsom's administration. Formerly the Chief Producer of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), and artistic director of California Shakespeare Theater in Berkeley and Orinda, California for 16 years, Moscone received the inaugural Zelda Fichandler Award, given by the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation for his transformative work in theater in 2009.
Delia Jarrett-Macauley, also known as Dee Jarrett-Macauley, is a London-based British writer, academic and broadcaster of Sierra Leonean heritage. Her debut novel, Moses, Citizen & Me, won the 2006 Orwell Prize for political writing, the first novel to have been awarded the prize. She has devised and presented features on BBC Radio, as well as being a participant in a range of programmes. As a multi-disciplinary scholar in history, literature and cultural politics, she has taught at Leeds University, Birkbeck, University of London, and other educational establishments, most recently as a fellow in English at the University of Warwick. She is also a business and arts consultant, specialising in organisation development.
Desdemona Chiang is a Taiwan-born American theatre director, and co-artistic director of Azeotrope in Seattle, Washington. Her directing credits include the Guthrie Theater, Alley Theatre, South Coast Repertory, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Seattle Repertory Theatre, California Shakespeare Theater, Playmakers Repertory Company, and ACT Theatre. She directs in a variety of genres, including Shakespeare, new plays, and musicals.
Laurie Woolery is a Latinx playwright, director, and educator based in New York City. She is the director of Public Works at The Public Theater and founding member of The Sol Project. In 2014 she was awarded a Fuller Road Artist Residency for Women Directors of Color. She is best known for her 2017 musical adaptation of As You Like It.
Ayanna Thompson is Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University and Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies (ACMRS). She was the 2018–19 president of the Shakespeare Association of America. She specializes in Renaissance drama and issues of race in performance.