Deborah Warner
is an English director of theater and opera, and famous for radical and
highly controversial interpretations of Shakespeare, Ibsen, Brecht and Beckett. After training
at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama. she founded The KICK Theatre Company,
which brought a Shakespeare production to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival every year. Her big
break came in 1987, when she was invited to direct Titus Andronicus for the Royal Shakespeare
Company. The success of that production paved the way for an RSC invitation to direct Electra,
through which she met her longtime collaborator (and onetime partner), actress Fiona Shaw. In
the UK, Warner, 58, has won two Olivier Awards for Best Director; in New York, she has been
nominated for a Tony Award and three Drama Desk Awards.
Phyllida Lloyd
is an English director of
stage and screen; she may be best known
for her films Mamma Mia! (2008) and The
Iron Lady (2011). Lloyd, 60, recently directed
a groundbreaking, all-female trilogy of
Shakespeare plays, including Julius Caesar,
Henry IV and The Tempest. All three
productions ran at the Donmar Warehouse
Photo by Roland Gerrits.
in London and at St. Ann’s Warehouse
in Brooklyn, New York. Lloyd’s creative
Ariane Mnouchkine
collaborators also tend to be women, perhaps
is widely considered one of the world’s most influential auteurs. Born
explaining why she is sometimes considered
in the suburbs of Paris, she co-founded Théâtre du Soleil in 1964 at the age of 25. Mnouchkine’s
a “political artist” centered on the female
oeuvre is staggering, with work that consistently engages history and politics, is often devised
experience. In 2010, Lloyd was awarded the
through collective improvisation, and regularly draws on performance traditions from all over
the globe, including Noh, Kathakali, Kabuki, mime and circus. Her awards and honors include the
Photo by Fryta73
International Ibsen Award, in 2009, and the Goethe Medal, in 2011.
CBE by Queen Elizabeth II for her service to
drama.
Elizabeth LeCompte is an American director of experimental theater, dance and film, and Katie Mitchell is a widely admired, deeply controversial English director of theatre and opera.
a co-founder of The Wooster Group. LeCompte, 73, has directed more than 40 productions for Her visual style, penchant for irreverence with classic texts and radical-feminist worldview have
the legendary ensemble, and is well-known for imaginative deconstructions of classic texts, use sparked debates among audiences and critics alike. Early in her career, Mitchell, 53, traveled
of multimedia, and a collage-like visual aesthetic. She is the recipient of the NEA Distinguished through Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, where a major influence was Constantin
Artists Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement in American Theater, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Stanislavski’s acting technique. In 1990, in London, Mitchell founded Classics on a Shoestring,
Skowhegan Medal for Performance, the Chevalier des Artes et Lettres from the French Cultural offering inventive mashups of such classics as Women of Troy and The House of Bernarda Alba.
Ministry and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has worked at the National Theatre, Royal Court, Royal Opera House and English National
Opera. In recent years, Mitchell has worked primarily in Europe, prompting Charlotte Higgins of
The Guardian to dub her “British theatre’s queen in exile.” Queen Elizabth II awarded the OBE to
Mitchell in 2009 for services to drama.
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