Lileana Blain-Cruz has joined Lincoln Center Theater as resident director. As part of LCT’s artistic staff, Blain-Cruz will direct at least one production a year in either Broadway's Vivian Beaumont Theater or Off-Broadway's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. She will also work with fellow Resident Director Bartlett Sher and Producing Artistic Director André Bishop in developing and choosing LCT’s programming.
“We are very pleased that Lileana has agreed to make LCT her artistic home base,” said Bishop. “The productions she has directed for us over these past seasons have been visceral, powerful, stunning, and always innovative. We especially cannot wait until she brings that same incredible vision and scope to the Beaumont.”
The theatre artist’s directing credits at LCT include Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Marys Seacole, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ War, and Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline. Up next, she’ll direct Somi Kakoma’s Dreaming Zenzille at St. Louis Repertory Theater, Iphigenia with Esperanza Spalding and Wayne Shorter, and The Listeners, a new opera by Missy Mazzoli which will premiere at Opera Norway and Opera Philadelphia.
The director earned an Obie Award for her work on Marys Seacole and The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World AKA The Negro Book of the Dead at Signature Theater. In addition, her recent credits include Anatomy of a Suicide at Atlantic Theater Company, Fefu and Her Friends at Theatre For a New Audience, Girls at Yale Repertory Theatre, Faust at Opera Omaha, and The House That Will Not Stand at New York Theatre Workshop.
Blain-Cruz is currently a part of the "Usual Suspects" and "Artistic Instigators" at New York Theatre Workshop and a resident director at Yale Rep, having previously completed an Allen Lee Hughes Directing fellowship at Arena Stage. Among the honors she’s received are the Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, the United States Artist Fellowship, and the Josephine Abady Award from the League of Professional Theater Women.
Additional recent hires in the New York theatre community:
Khady Kamara Named Executive Director at Second Stage Theater
Off-Broadway's Public Theater Taps Saheem Ali and Shanta Thake as Associate Artistic Directors
Aaron Roman Weiner Named New Artistic Director of LAByrinth Theater Company
New Hires at Dramatists Guild, A.R.T./New York, Theatre Philadelphia, More