Lisa Peterson
Lisa Peterson (Writer/Director) is a two-time OBIE Award-winning writer and director. She won her first OBIE for directing Caryl Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire at New York Theatre Workshop in 1990, and her 2nd OBIE, as well as a Lortel Award, for writing and directing An Iliad with Denis O’Hare in 2012, also at NYTW. Since then, she and O’Hare have written The Good Book, commissioned and produced by the Court Theatre in Chicago, and recently at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Her directing work includes the world premiere productions of new plays by Tony Kushner (Slavs!, Humana Festival and NYTW), Beth Henley (Ridiculous Fraud, McCarter Theater), Donald Margulies (Collected Stories, Manhattan Theater Club; The Model Apartment and Shipwrecked at Primary Stages), Naomi Wallace (Trestle at Pope Lick Creek at NYTW and Birdy at WP Theater), Marlane Meyer (Patron Saint of Sea Monsters, The Chemistry of Change at Playwrights Horizons), Jose Rivera (Sueno at Hartford Stage and MCC), Basil Kreimendahl (We’re Gonna Be Ok at ATL) and many more, as well as classic plays at theaters across the country, including the Guthrie, Arena Stage, Yale Rep, Hartford Stage, Huntington Theater, Seattle Rep, Portland Center Stage, American Conservatory Theater, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Baltimore Center Stage, California Shakespeare Theater, Actors’ Theater of Louisville, Dallas Theater Center, Alley Theater, and South Coast Repertory, among others. Recent New York credits include Ernest Shacklton Loves Me, Book by Joe DiPietro, Music & Lyrics by Brendan Milburn & Val Vigoda (2ST Tony Kiser Theater); Hamlet in Bed by Michael Laurence (Rattlestick); King Liz by Fernanda Coppel (Second Stage Uptown); To The Bone by Lisa Ramirez (Cherry Lane).
Lisa has directed regularly at Berkeley Rep (where she was Associate Director for the last 3 seasons), the Mark Taper Forum (where she was Resident Director for 10 years) and La Jolla Playhouse (Associate Director for 3 years). She has developed many new plays at the Sundance Theatre Lab, where she served as the Guest Artistic Director in 2019, as well as the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, and the Ojai Playwrights Conference. Upcoming projects: The Waves, adapted from the novel by Virginia Woolf with music by David Bucknam and Adam Gwon; The Song of Rome, a commission for the McCarter Theater, written with Denis O’Hare; The Idea of Order, inspired by the poetry of Wallace Stevens and written with Todd Almond; and new musical projects with Byron Au Yong/Aaron Jafferis, and with Jill Sobule.