Tom Dugdale

Theater

Tom Dugdale

Princess Grace Award:
Theater Apprenticeship, 2012, Grace Le Vine Theater Award

?Tom Dugdale is a multidisciplinary theater-maker working mainly as a director, but also as an actor, writer, designer, and composer. His work includes new play development, adaptation of classical texts, and collisions of theater with other art, such as his collaborations with Hungarian violinist and contemporary music specialist, János Négyesy, with whom Tom created several theatricalized recitals.
 
Tom has directed in major cities throughout the U.S., including New York, Los Angeles, and San Diego. A champion of new work, he has developed plays for some of the country's top new play festivals, including the Contemporary American Theater Festival, the Humana Festival at Actors Theater of Louisville, and La Jolla Playhouse's DNA New Works Series. Internationally, Tom maintains a close relationship with Romanian theater. At the Hungarian Theater of Cluj, a Romanian national theater, he has staged four productions: Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, an adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s short story Diary of a Madman, and a stage version of Lars von Trier’s film, Breaking the Waves, reflecting his interest in the intersection of theater and cinema. Also in Romania, with MStudio Movement Theater, Tom directed his own adaptation of Euripides' Alcestis. Tom writes for theater and film. He co-authored the short film, Like Animals, an official selection in 2017 for the New Hope Film Festival, the Asian American International Film Festival, and the LA Shorts Festival. His screenplay, I cant go on, I must go on, has been preselected for the 2018 Reykjavik Visions Film Festival whose mission is to promote cross-cultural understanding through cinema.
 
Tom is co-Founder and co-Artistic Director of The Trip, a theater company creating multidisciplinary, often site-specific, performances that investigate new possibilities in narrative, audience engagement, and theatrical space. The Trip has presented work in spaces ranging from a parking garage to a former military barracks to one of San Diego's hottest tattoo shops, where an audience member was tattooed (willingly!) while a program of new plays unfolded. La Jolla Playhouse supported two major productions by the company: a backyard barbecue staging of Thornton Wilder's Our Town and Chekhov's Three Sisters on a tennis court. The Trip's Orpheus & Eurydice, an adaptation of the myth through online content, live performance, and film, was nominated for Best New Play by the San Diego Critics Circle in 2014. The Trip will present a major new work in New York in the summer of 2018.
 
Tom has held teaching appointments at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), Texas State University, and The Ohio State University, where he is currently Assistant Professor of Theater. His directing students have won the Princess Grace Award, Drama League directing fellowships, the Julie Taymor World Theater Fellowship, and the Kennedy Center ACTF National Directing Award. Tom holds a B.A. in Theater from Dartmouth College, an M.F.A. in Directing from the University of California San Diego, and he trained as an opera singer at Manhattan School of Music. 


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