Lincoln Center Theater Announces The 24th Annual Director's Lab

Lincoln Center Theater will again open its doors for the 24th annual LCT Directors Lab, a three-week developmental program for nurturing young professional stage directors from across the country and around the world. This year's lab will take place from August 6-25.

The 2018 Directors Lab, under the direction of Anne Cattaneo, will offer the 70 directors, working together in groups, the opportunity to experiment with a form of theater that they have not yet tried. This year's participants, who hail from 11 U.S. states as well as 30 foreign countries (including Kuwait, Lebanon, Russia, Ecuador, Cameroon, Kosovo, Cyprus, Uruguay, and Taiwan) will work together to expand their artistic repertoire through the support, expertise, and encouragement of their contemporaries, and in turn, offer experience and artistry to others under the same mission. Through a series of workshops, shared sessions, rehearsals, investigations, and discussions with master artists, the emerging directors will develop their craft while fostering collaborative relationships among a peer community of artists. This year, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar is advising the Lab.

The Directors Lab was established in 1995 by Lincoln Center Theater to respond to a need for a meeting place and training ground for new directors for the American Theater. Utilizing the resources and artists associated with Lincoln Center Theater, the Directors Lab seeks to find ways to sustain and support new directors. As the 1970s saw a major effort to develop and nurture the voices of a multitude of new playwrights, Lincoln Center Theater, through this program, sparked a new generation of directors, creating a base for the flowering of emerging talent. Lincoln Center Theater provides the Lab free of charge to its participants. Directors Lab alumni include Lileana Blain-Cruz, James Bundy (Dean of the Yale School of Drama), Trip Cullman, Lee Sunday Evans, Wendy Goldberg (Artistic Director of the O'Neill Theater), Anne Kauffman, Moisés Kaufman (Founder and Artistic Director of Tectonic Theater Project), Pam MacKinnon (Artistic Director of ACT), Davis McCallum (Artistic Director of Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival), Kevin Moriarty (Artistic Director of the Dallas Theater Center), Lila Neugebauer, Alex Timbers, and many others.

Among the wide range of master artists from around the world and around the US who have conducted Directors Lab workshops over the years are JoAnne Akalaitis, Edward Albee, Shi-Zheng Chen, Richard Eyre, Robert Falls, Nicholas Hytner, Mark Lamos, Jacques Lassalle, Simon McBurney, Jonathan Miller, Andrey Moguchi, Duma Ndlovu, Michael Ondaatje, Tina Packer, Bartlett Sher, Daniel Sullivan, Robert Wilson, and George C. Wolfe.

The LCT Directors Lab has spun off Labs in Melbourne, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Toronto, and will be launching a new lab in the Mediterranean region later this year which will start in Beirut, Lebanon in 2019 and move the following year to Barcelona. Over 1200 directors have participated in the program since it was founded in 1995.

LCT's 2018 Directors Lab is supported by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, Charles E. Culpeper/Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Irene Diamond Fund, Kenneth L. Wyse, and The Christopher Lightfoot Walker Literary Fund at LCT.