Gary M. English
Professor, Dramatic Arts
Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor
Gary English is a stage director and designer with over 100 productions at many of America’s major repertory theaters including The Pittsburgh Public Theatre, The Pioneer Theatre Company in Salt Lake City, The San Francisco Playhouse, The Clarence Brown Theatre, Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, Buffalo Studio Arena, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, The Merrimack Repertory Theatre, George St. Playhouse, and The Berkshire Theatre Festival where he designed productions of Endgame and Tommy and directed The Miracle Worker, and American Primitive, by William Gibson. He directed over 20 productions at Connecticut Repertory Theatre including The Grapes of Wrath, Olives and Blood, by Michael Bradford, and Man of La Mancha which won a Best Production of a Musical award from the Connecticut Drama Critics Circle. Other awards include best production of a musical for A Little Night Music, from the Boston Drama Critics awards, and two Best Scene Design Awards from the Pittsburgh Drama Critics for his productions of The Odyssey and Sunday in the Park with George. Most recently he was nominated for Best Scene Design by the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Awards for his production of Red Velvet.
Gary English served as Head of the Department of Dramatic Arts and Founding Artistic Director for Connecticut Repertory Theatre for 15 years. He now teaches theatre studies including theatre and human rights as an affiliate faculty member of the Human Rights Institute. In 2005, he was promoted to the rank of Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor, the highest academic award at the University of Connecticut. Gary English has worked regularly in Palestine since 2010. From May of 2012 through June of 2013 he served as Artistic Director of The Freedom Theatre in the Jenin Refugee Camp. He directed and designed The Island, by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, which performed in the West Bank and toured to theatre festivals in Brazil, The United States, Norway, Sweden, India and to France in 2015. From January of 2017 to June of 2018, he served as Visiting Professor in Media Studies at Al/Quds Bard College, in Abu Dis, Palestine.
Current book projects include the anthology: Stories Under Occupation and other Palestinian Plays, co-edited with Samer Al Saber to be published by Seagull Press in 2019. His essay, “The Freedom Theatre: Artistic Resistance and Human Rights in the International Sphere,” was recently published in the anthology, The Freedom Theatre: Performing Cultural Resistance in Palestine, published by LeftWord Books.
