Matt Mitler

Last updated

Matt Mitler
Born (1955-05-27) May 27, 1955 (age 69)
NationalityAmerican
Occupation(s)Actor, voice actor, director
Years active1983–present

Matt Mitler (born May 27, 1955) is an American actor known for his work directing over 80 productions and starring in Cracking Up and The Mutilator. He is also founding director of the Dzieci Theatre.

Contents

Training

Matt Mitler initially trained in Humanistic and Existential Psychology, and Group Process before becoming involved with theatre. He studied with Jerzy Grotowski and Eugenio Barba in theatre; Carl Rogers and R. D. Laing in psychotherapy; and Jean Houston, Ram Dass, Elizabeth Cogburn, and Michel de Salzmann in more esoteric disciplines.

Directing and Teaching

From 1977 to 2005, Mitler led non-verbal, physically-oriented therapeutic workshops in a variety of settings including Hutchings Psychiatric Center (NY); The Association for Humanistic Psychology; The National Theatre School of Sweden; New Brunswick and Union Theological Seminaries; The Institute for Clergy Excellence; The Heart of the Healer Foundation; The Parliament for the World's Religions; and the graduate school of The University of Psychology of Warsaw, where his essay, Art and Therapy was published in the anthology, New Directions in Psychotherapy.

He performed, directed, taught, and formed the international theatre collective The Tribe in Amsterdam, which presented interactive works at a variety of therapeutic institutions and was featured at Le Festival Mondial du Theatre in Nancy, France. Other festivals which presented Mitler’s work include: The Koln Festival, Vienna Festwochen, The International Festival of Fools, The Gaukler Festival of Mime, The International Festival of Mimes and Pantomimes (Poland), and The Theatre of Nations.

Mitler has designed and directed more than 80 theatrical productions; among them, his own adaptation of Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonely Hearts for the 29th Street Repertory Theatre; the critically acclaimed musical Sofrito, featuring The Latin Legends All Stars, for the New Victory Theater; and the apocalyptic epic Dirty Money (also co-author) for Teatr Am Turm in Frankfurt, Germany. He has also staged the works of dozens of solo artists and ensembles at a variety of NYC venues including The Samuel Beckett Theatre, LaMama ETC, and The Joseph Papp Public Theatre.

Performance and Film

Mitler has been a stand-up comic, a mime, a celebrity impersonator, a voice artist, and a therapist. He appeared on numerous television programs and starred in over a dozen Grade Z motion pictures in the 80s before creating his own film projects. His first film feature, Cracking Up, (producer, director, writer, editor and actor), garnered a number of awards; including Best Film in The Venice International Film Festival Critic’s Week and the People’s Choice Award in The New York Underground Film Festival.

Selected works

Select Publications

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Improvisational theatre</span> Theatrical genre featuring unscripted performance

Improvisational theatre, often called improvisation or improv, is the form of theatre, often comedy, in which most or all of what is performed is unplanned or unscripted, created spontaneously by the performers. In its purest form, the dialogue, action, story, and characters are created collaboratively by the players as the improvisation unfolds in present time, without use of an already prepared, written script.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sean Gullette</span> American actor

Sean Leland Sebastian Gullette is an American film director, writer, screenwriter, actor, and producer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Johannes Grenzfurthner</span> Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

Johannes Grenzfurthner is an Austrian artist, filmmaker, writer, actor, curator, theatre director, performer and lecturer. Grenzfurthner is the founder, conceiver and artistic director of monochrom, an international art and theory group and film production company. Most of his artworks are labeled monochrom.

The Columbia University School of the Arts is the fine arts graduate school of Columbia University in Morningside Heights, New York. It offers Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degrees in Film, Visual Arts, Theatre and Writing, as well as the Master of Arts (MA) degree in Film Studies. It also works closely with the Arts Initiative at Columbia University (CUArts) and organizes the Columbia University Film Festival (CUFF), a week-long program of screenings, screenplay, and teleplay readings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Napier Robertson</span> New Zealand writer, actor, film director and producer

James William Napier Robertson is a New Zealand writer, film director, actor and producer, who wrote and directed 2009 film I'm Not Harry Jenson, and 2014 film The Dark Horse, for which he won Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Film at the 2014 New Zealand Film Awards, and which was declared by New Zealand critics "One of the greatest New Zealand films ever made".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Larry Fessenden</span> American actor and filmmaker

Laurence T. Fessenden is an American actor, producer, writer, director, film editor, and cinematographer. He is the founder of the New York based independent production outfit Glass Eye Pix. His writer/director credits include No Telling, Habit (1997), Wendigo (2001), and The Last Winter, which is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. He has also directed the television feature Beneath (2013), an episode of the NBC TV series Fear Itself (2008) entitled "Skin and Bones", and a segment of the anthology horror-comedy film The ABCs of Death 2 (2014). He is the writer, with Graham Reznick, of the BAFTA Award-winning Sony PlayStation video game Until Dawn. He has acted in numerous films including Bringing Out the Dead (1999), Broken Flowers (2005), I Sell the Dead (2009), Jug Face (2012), We Are Still Here (2015), In a Valley of Violence (2016), Like Me (2017), and The Dead Don't Die (2019), Brooklyn 45 (2023), and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Rubbo</span>

Michael Dattilo Rubbo is an Australian documentarian/filmmaker.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ian Iqbal Rashid</span> British film director and poet

Ian Iqbal Rashid is a poet, screenwriter and filmmaker known in particular for his volumes of poetry, for the TV series Sort Of and This Life and the feature films Touch of Pink and How She Move.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Bugental</span> American psychologist (1915–2008)

James Frederick Thomas Bugental was one of the predominant theorists and advocates of the Existential-humanistic therapy movement. He was a therapist, teacher and writer for over 50 years. He received his Ph.D. from Ohio State University, was named a Fellow of the American Psychological Association in 1955, and was the first recipient of the APA's Division of Humanistic Psychology's Rollo May Award. He held leadership positions in a number of professional organizations, including president of the California State Psychological Association.

Mary Sweeney is an American director, writer, film editor and film producer. She was briefly married to American film director David Lynch, with whom she collaborated for 20 years. Sweeney worked with Lynch on several films and television series, most notably the original Twin Peaks series (1990), Lost Highway (1997), The Straight Story (1999), and Mulholland Drive (2001). Sweeney is the Dino and Martha De Laurentiis Endowed Professor in the Writing Division of the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. She was formerly the chair of the Film Independent board of directors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jay Wade Edwards</span> American film director and editor

Jay Wade Edwards is an American film director, television producer and editor.

Jeremy Craig Kasten is an American film director, screenwriter, producer and editor. Kasten is best known for his arthouse horror pieces, which range from psychological horror films such as The Attic Expeditions (2001) and The Dead Ones (2010) to Grand Guignol, such as his re-imagining of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s classic splatter film The Wizard of Gore (2007) and his contribution to the horror anthology film The Theatre Bizarre (2011). Other work includes the zombie film All Soul’s Day: Dia de los Muertos (2005) and the drug-fueled vampire film The Thirst (2006).

Ivaylo P. Simidchiev is a film director, writer and producer from Bulgaria. His short film Mud won 8 international awards and was a competition selection at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival edition.

Matt Tyrnauer is an American film director. He directed the documentary feature Valentino: The Last Emperor (2009), which was short listed for an Oscar nomination in 2010, Citizen Jane: Battle for the City (2016), the Emmy nominated, Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood (2017), the 2018 documentary Studio 54 detailing New York's famed Studio 54 nightclub, Where's My Roy Cohn? (2019), and the Showtime four-part series, The Reagans (2020). Tyrnauer also developed, and executive produced, with producing partner Corey Reeser, the docuseries Home, directing its Hong Kong episode, about the Gary Chang's Domestic Transformer home. The nine-part series premiered on Apple TV Plus in April 2020. Currently, Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood is being adapted as a narrative film, with Tyrnauer and Reeser producing, Luca Guadagnino directing and Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg writing the script. Tyrnauer has been Editor-At-Large and Special Correspondent for Vanity Fair, where he has contributed many feature articles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">51st Venice International Film Festival</span>

The 51st annual Venice International Film Festival was held on 1 September to 12 September, 1994.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jason V. Brock</span> American writer, artist, filmmaker, musician

Jason Vincent Brock is an American author, artist, scholar, musician, editor and filmmaker.

Mort Ransen was a Canadian film and television director, editor, screenwriter and producer, best known for his Genie Award-winning 1995 film Margaret's Museum.

Maurice Stanley Friedman was an interdisciplinary, interreligious philosopher of dialogue. His intellectual career - spanning fifty years of study, teaching, writing, translating, traveling, mentoring, and co-founding the Institute for Dialogical Psychotherapy - has prompted a language of genuine dialogue. With illuminating range, he has applied Martin Buber’s philosophy of dialogue to the human sciences. After receiving his Ph.D. in religion and history from the University of Chicago in 1950, Friedman had a long career of teaching and publishing.

Daniel Joseph Tomasulo is an American counseling psychologist, writer, and professor and the Academic Director and core faculty at the Spirituality Mind Body Institute (SMBI), Teachers College, Columbia University. He holds a Ph.D. in psychology, MFA in writing, and a Master of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, and was formerly the Director of the New York City Certification in Positive Psychology for the New York Open Center. He is also a Review Editor for Frontiers in Psychology's special section on Positive Psychology and recipient of the Teachers College, Columbia University 2021 Teaching Award.

<i>Thane of East County</i> 2015 film by Jesse Keller

Thane of East County, also known as Blood Will Have Blood, is a 2015 black and white horror drama film written and directed by Jesse Keller in his feature film debut and is adapted from William Shakespeare's play Macbeth. The film won Best Drama at Poppy Jasper International Film Festival and stars Carr Cavender, Molly Beucher, Connor Sullivan and Karl Backus.