Photo by Kevin Berne

CAREY PERLOFF (Artistic Director) is celebrating her 18th season as artistic director of A.C.T., where she most recently directed Timberlake Wertenbaker's new version of Racine's Phèdre in collaboration with the Stratford Shakespeare Festival; other recent productions include José Rivera's Boleros for the Disenchanted, Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll (a coproduction with The Huntington Theatre Company, nominated for an Elliot Norton Award for Best Production), and John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. Known for directing innovative productions of classics and championing new writing for the theater, Perloff has also directed for A.C.T. the world premieres of Philip Kan Gotanda's After the War (A.C.T. commission) and her own adaptation (with Paul Walsh) of A Christmas Carol; the American premieres of Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love and Indian Ink and Harold Pinter's Celebration and The Room; A.C.T.–commissioned translations/adaptations of Hecuba, The Misanthrope, Enrico IV, Mary Stuart, Uncle Vanya, and A Mother (based on Maxim Gorky's Vassa Zheleznova); Harley Granville-Barker's The Voysey Inheritance (adapted by David Mamet); the world premiere of Leslie Ayvazian's Singer's Boy; and major revivals of Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill's Happy End (including a critically acclaimed cast album recording), A Doll's House, Waiting for Godot, The Three Sisters, The Threepenny Opera, Old Times, The Rose Tattoo, Antigone, Creditors, Home, The Tempest, and Stoppard's Travesties, The Real Thing, Night and Day, and Arcadia. Perloff's work for A.C.T. also includes Marie Ndiaye's Hilda, the world premieres of Marc Blitzstein's No for an Answer and David Lang/Mac Wellman's The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, and the West Coast premiere of her own play The Colossus of Rhodes (Susan Smith Blackburn Award finalist). Her play Luminescence Dating premiered in New York at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, was coproduced by A.C.T. and the Magic Theatre, and is published by Dramatists Play Service. Her play Waiting for the Flood has received workshops in A.C.T.'s First Look series and at New York Stage & Film and Roundabout Theater Company; her latest play, Higher, was developed at New York Stage & Film and as part of A.C.T.'s First Look series at Stanford University. Her one-act play The Morning After was a finalist for the Heideman Award at Actors Theatre of Louisville. Perloff has collaborated as a director on new plays by many notable contemporary writers, including Gotanda, Robert O'Hara, and Lucy Caldwell. She is currently developing a new dance-theater piece, The Tosca Project, with choreographer Val Caniparoli; a major production of Phèdre (translated by Timberlake Wertenbaker) for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival; and a new Bacchae for the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

Before joining A.C.T., Perloff was artistic director of Classic Stage Company in New York, where she directed the world premiere of Ezra Pound's Elektra, the American premiere of Pinter's Mountain Language and The Birthday Party, and many classic works. Under Perloff's leadership, Classic Stage won numerous OBIE Awards, including the 1988 OBIE for artistic excellence. In 1993, she directed the world premiere of Steve Reich and Beryl Korot's opera The Cave at the Vienna Festival and Brooklyn Academy of Music.

A recipient of France's Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the National Corporate Theatre Fund's 2007 Artistic Achievement Award, Perloff received a B.A. Phi Beta Kappa in classics and comparative literature from Stanford University and was a Fulbright Fellow at Oxford. She was on the faculty of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University for seven years and teaches and directs in the A.C.T. Master of Fine Arts Program. She is the proud mother of Lexie and Nicholas.