Director | Scenographer | Visual Storyteller
I create theatrical worlds that reveal what language alone cannot.
Through scenography, movement, sound, and image, I create visceral performances where myth, memory, desire, and political histories collide.
I approach directing through scenography. Space, light, bodies, objects, architecture, and sound become equal authors of meaning.
Drawn to thresholds between memory and forgetting, ritual and performance, beauty and violence, I approach theatre as an act of excavation - revealing the invisible forces that shape our lives and the worlds concealed beneath every story.
Working across theatre, installation, dance, architecture, fashion, and visual art, I create performances that invite audiences to enter, rather than observe. I trust image as much as dialogue, silence as much as speech, and atmosphere as much as action.
Every performance begins with a question: What remains unseen until we create the conditions to see it?
“If we stay on a realistic level we remain ignorant of the eternal world and therefore of the true meaning of existence and destiny, of life and death.”
-Maurice Maeterlinck
Bio.
Michael is a director, scenographer, and educator whose work spans theatre, installation, performance art, and interdisciplinary performance. His productions investigate the intersections of myth, memory, identity, and political history through visually immersive theatrical worlds.
His directing has been presented internationally and across the United States, including collaborations with the New York Theatre Workshop, the British Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Her Majesty's Theatre, Arcola Theatre, Catskill Mountain Shakespeare, Serenbe Playhouse, and numerous regional and university theatres. His work ranges from world-premiere plays and devised performance to radical reimaginings of classical texts.
He is a former New York Theatre Workshop 2050 Directing Fellow, Drama League Directing Fellow, member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, and director with The Civilians R&D Group. He earned his MFA in Directing from the California Institute of the Arts and previously studied Performance Art at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London.
He joins the faculty of Dartmouth College as Assistant Professor of Theatre, where he teaches directing and acting while continuing to develop new work nationally and internationally.