SHANNON SINDELAR

Theater Director

Shannon Sindelar is a New York-based director and producer who works on classic and contemporary plays as well as compositionally, using a wide range of form and drawing on elements from sound, literature and media. 

World premieres include a new translation of Peretz Hirschbein's On the Other Side of the River (New Worlds Theatre Project/HERE), Sara Farrington's Requiem for Black Marie (Incubator Arts Project), Miranda Huba’s Candy Tastes Nice (HERE/Madame X), and New York premieres include Tennessee Williams' The Remarkable Rooming House of Mme. LeMonde (Target Margin/Bushwick Starr) and Jason Grote's A Christmas Carol (The Brick).

She has directed regional premieres of Jennifer Haley’s The Nether, Bathsheba Doran’s The Mystery of Love & Sex and Kin, C. Denby Swanson’s The Norwegians, Liz Duffy Adams’ Or,, Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime (Dobama Theatre), the Midwest premiere of Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses (Dobama Theatre) and the Southern premiere of Jaclyn Backhaus’ Men on Boats (The NOLA Project). 

She was the co-Artistic Director of the cross-media performance group 31 Down, and for five years directed the company’s original productions, includingHere at Home (Bushwick Starr), Red Over Red (Incubator Arts Project), The Assember Dilator (PS 122), I Used to be Curious (LOUD) (Prelude Festival), Universal Robots (Ontological) and The Scream Contest (PS 122/Seattle’s Bumbershoot/Orange County Arts).

For three years, she was the producing artistic director of the Brooklyn-based company Brave New World Repertory Theatre, where she directed the world premiere of RN Healey's NUN$ and a spare, environmentally-specific production of Shaw’s Major Barbara in a church. Highlights of her time there included the New York premiere of Gertrude Stein's 100-year-old Pink Melon Joy and Elmer Rice’s Street Scene, where the company closed off a Brooklyn street, using the façade of a tenement building and surrounding street to stage the work, free to the public. 

Prior to this, she served as managing and programming director of theatre auteur Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater (NYC). She produced his annual off-Broadway works, in addition to overseeing The Ontological’s Incubator program for independent artists. The program garnered an Obie grant under her direction and in 2010 transitioned to become its own organization and take over the Ontological’s theater space in New York’s East Village. She served as the first producing director and after transitioning out of that role remained on the curatorial staff for the new organization, the Incubator Arts Project; during her tenure the organization presented the world premieres of notable productions, including Dave Malloy/Alec Duffy/Rick Burkhardt’s Three Pianos (Obie Award, transfer to off-Broadway with New York Theatre Workshop) and Qui Nguyen’s The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G (transfer to off-Broadway with Ma-Yi). She founded and produced the Incubator’s annual Other Forces festival, which ran for five years. During that time, the festival premiered Julia Jarcho's Grimly Handsome (Obie for Best New American Play), and Daniel Fish's Tom Ryan Thinks He’s James Mason...., as well as a site-specific, mobile production of Alexandra Collier’s Take Me Home that took place in a taxi for three viewers at a time.

She produced the New York premiere of David Adjmi’s Marie Antoinette, directed by Rebecca Taichman (Soho Rep), and served as literary manager for Manhattan Ensemble Theatre. She is currently part of a team of curators that programs the Obie-winning Little Theatre at NYC’s Dixon Place, a monthly performance series of new theatre, dance, performance and media, now in its 20th year. 

Shannon was a John Wells Directing Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, where she received her MFA.