Staff
SANDY SHINNER, Associate Artistic Director
Ms. Shinner has been with Victory Gardens for more than 30 years and, with Dennis Zacek and Marcelle McVay, was honored to accept the 2001 Tony Award® for Outstanding Regional Theatre on behalf of the theater. Most recently, she produced the inaugural IGNITION Festival which launched The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity by Kristoffer Diaz and Year Zero by Michael Golamco. Last season, she directed Aditi Brennan Kapil’s Love Person for VGT, a showcase production of Jeffrey Sweet’s Flyovers at New York’s 78th Street Theatre Lab and co-directed (with Jessica Thebus) the revival of Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl. She directed the world premiere of Joel Drake Johnson’s Four Places and I Sailed with Magellan adapted by Claudia Allen from Stuart Dybek’s novel, all for Victory Gardens, as well as Johnson’s Tranquillity Woods for Steppenwolf’s First Look series.
Other recent directing projects include the world premieres of Memory House by Kathleen Tolan (Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival and VGT) and Trying by Joanna McClelland Glass, which transferred from Victory Gardens to off-Broadway’s Promenade Theatre. She directed the world premiere of Jeffrey Sweet’s Bluff here as well as at the 78th Street Theatre Lab in New York and Phoenix Theatre. Ms. Shinner is a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers and was a finalist for the Joe A. Callaway Director’s Award for the New York production of Trying. She is an editor of Victory Gardens Presents: Seven Plays from the Playwrights Ensemble, which was published by Northwestern University Press. She has been an adjunct professor at DePaul and will direct the world premiere of The Civic by Patrick McLean at DePaul this spring.
