Angela M. Farr Schiller, PhD

Angela M. Farr Schiller, PhD is an Emmy Award-winning director (2021), a multi-award-winning dramaturg, educator, and scholar. As a dramaturg, she has worked on numerous productions including the recent West Coast premiere of Confederates by Dominique Morisseau under the direction of Nataki Garett at the Tony Award-winning Oregon Shakespeare Festival (2022). Additionally, she works as a dramaturg-in-residence with the Atlanta-based Working Title Playwrights (WTP), the leading new play development organization in the Southeast. As a director, her production of Dreamgirls was nominated for six (San Francisco) Theatre Bay Area Awards including Outstanding Direction of a Musical and Outstanding Production of a Musical (2013), and her production of In the Red and Brown Waterwon an Outstanding Director Award (2016) from the Kennedy Center College Theatre Festival. Her televised production of The Georgia High School Musical Theatre Awards won a Southeast Emmy Award (2021) for Outstanding Special Coverage Event. As a scholar, Dr. Schiller has presented her research on the intersections of race and performance at Performance Studies International (PSI), the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), Association of Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), and the International Society for the Oral Literatures of Africa (ISOLA). Her most recent published book projects are The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays (Bloomsbury, 2021), nominated for a national Lambda Literary Award, and Troubling Traditions: Canonicity, Theatre, and Performance in the US (Routledge, 2022) with a forthcoming article featured in the international journal Modern Drama entitled “Touching Back While Black: Self-Defense and the Politics of Black US citizenship in Paul Green’s In Abraham’s Bosom” (2023). Her work is ultimately rooted in revealing the ways that performance can be utilized as a meaningful tool for critical thinking, social justice, and the development of empathy and compassion for the human experience.

Dr. Schiller received her B.A. in Theater from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she completed her final year of study at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. She also studied at the University of Ghana in Accra, Ghana, and the University degli Studi di Siena, Italy. She received her M.A. from the Department of Social and Cultural in Africana Studies from New York University and completed her Ph.D. in Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.