Diane Paulus named ART artistic director

Diane Paulus, an acclaimed theater and opera director and creator of the off-Broadway hit "The Donkey Show," has been named the new artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre.

Paulus, 41, is an award-winning New York based artist known for her ambitious fusions of theater with musical genres including jazz, rock, and R&B, as well as for her international work on the opera stage. Starting this fall, she will become the first woman artistic director of the ART, following founding director Robert Brustein (1980-2002) and Robert Woodruff (2002-2007). Gideon Lester is currently the ART's acting artistic director.

The appointment ends an exhaustive and at times turbulent 17-month search, during which one top candidate turned the job offer down.

Describing the position as "truly a dream come true" in an interview today, Paulus said she was not part of the initial search and was contacted by the search committee when the search reopened earlier this year.

"I jumped at the opportunity," said the 1988 Harvard graduate. "I really credit my time at Harvard, haunting the hallways at the ART as a young college student, with the decision I made in my life to pursue professional theater."

An Obie Award winner, Paulus is preparing to direct a production of "Kiss Me Kate" July 5 to Aug. 23 at the Glimmerglass Opera festival in Cooperstown, N.Y., and a revival of "Hair" at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park July 22 to Aug. 17 for the Public Theater.

She has won critical praise for her innovative and skillful work on the barest of stages, as in "Swimming with Watermelons," which the New York Times described as a "sweet tempered" and "oddly sexy" show she wrote with her husband, producer/writer Randy Weiner, about the interracial romance between her American father and Japanese mother. Paulus is perhaps best known for her widely popular "The Donkey Show," a Gen-X disco adaptation of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," which ran for six years off-Broadway and toured internationally to London, Edinburgh, Madrid, and France.

"I am very pleased to welcome Diane Paulus back to Harvard at this exciting point in time when we are actively studying ways in which to integrate arts more closely into the life and the curriculum of the University," said Harvard University president Drew Faust in a statement. "She is an accomplished director with an interest in and a talent for engaging young people."