Karin Coonrod

Karin Coonrod is a director and writer whose work has been seen and heard across the US and around the world.The New York Times calls her ”a theater artist of far-reaching inventiveness”…using a “style that deconstructs to construct.” Most recently she created a hybrid piece Whitman on Walls! mingling films with living poets on tour throughout the USA and UK, and continuing (2021-2024); The Merchant of Venice in the Jewish Ghetto in Venice (IT), a high-security men’s prison in Padova (IT) and on tour in the US (2016-2018); Babette’s Feast in Portland, Maine and off-Broadway (2018); her own texts&beheadings/ElizabethR at the Folger Theater in Washington DC, BAM/Next Wave Fest and a women’s prison (2015-2017). Other notable productions include Shakespeare’s Henry VI and Love’s Labor’s Lost (both at the Public Theater 1996+2011, where she was Artist-in-Residence in 1995-1996); King John and Julius Caesar (with Theater for a New Audience, 2000+2003); Hamlet (at California Shakespeare, 2000); The Tempest (at La Mama Theatre 2014); and Flannery O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge (at New York Theatre Workshop 2001, subsequently toured to Rome and around the USA and into Manhattan DOC, 2009-present); Monteverdi’s Orfeo (in Palazzo Simoncelli in Orvieto, Italy with Compagnia de’ Colombari 2014); Pirandello’s Enrico IV (at American Repertory Theatre 2001); Euripides’ Phoenician Women (performed with ART students at the Moscow Art Theater in 2008). Founding Director of Compagnia de’ Colombari (2004-now), an international company which performed Strangers & Other Angels (medieval mystery plays re-imagined for the 21st century in the streets of Orvieto, Italy 2004-2006), KC and the company launched a new tradition of theater in the streets of Orvieto. Coonrod is on the faculty of the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale since 2002. A book is under contract with the editors of Bloomsbury Press (UK) about the theater work of Karin Coonrod.