Randy Reinholz

Randy Reinholz, an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, was born in St. Louis, Missouri and lived in several small towns throughout the Midwest of the United States: Missouri, North Dakota, and Texas. He graduated high school from Camdenton, Missouri and pursued a higher education afterward. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Communication from William Jewell College in 1984 and Masters of Fine Arts in Acting from Cornell University in 1988. He is the Producing Artistic Director of Native Voices at the Autry, the nation’s only Equity theater company dedicated exclusively to the development and production of new plays by Native American, First Nations, and Alaska Native playwrights, cofounded with Producing Executive Director Jean Bruce Scott in 1993. They were honored for this work by Playwrights’ Arena with the Lee Melville Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Los Angeles Theatre Community in 2015. Off The Rails, his bawdy and irreverent adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure was developed by Native Voices at the Autry where it had its first production in Los Angeles, February 2015 and its World Premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival with Bill Rauch directing in July 2017. Reinholz wrote Up From Violence and Empire for American Theatre’s 20 Years on Wilson’s `Ground’: Voices considering the impact and the lasting legacy of August Wilson’s seminal 1995 speech and was honored as a Legacy Leader of Color for TCG’s “The Ground at 20” video project, he has received a McKnight Fellowship, and a MAP Grant. He has produced more than 35 scripts by Native American playwrights and directed over 60 plays in the United States, Australia, Mexico, and Canada including The Rez Sisters, Urban Tattoo, Jump Kiss, Now Look What You Made Me Do, The Waiting Room, How I Learned To Drive, Madame Mao, Blood At The Root, Anonymous, Wings of Night Sky Wings of Morning Light, The Red Road, and many productions of Shakespeare, Chekhov and Ibsen’s plays. He is a tenured Professor at San Diego State University, where he served as Head of Acting from 1997-2007, Director of the School of Theatre, Television, and Film from 2007-2012, and Director of Community Engagement and Innovation for the College of Professional Studies at SDSU from 2012-2015.