Derek Goldman is Artistic Director of the Davis Performing Arts Center and Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Georgetown University. He is an award-winning stage director, playwright, adapter, developer of new work, teacher, and published scholar, whose artistic work has been seen around the country, Off-Broadway and at numerous major regional theaters, as well as internationally.

He is also Founding Artistic Director of the StreetSigns Center for Literature and Performance, an award-winning socially-engaged professional theatre founded in Chicago, devoted to new adaptations of literature for the stage, re-imagined classics, and ensemble-devised performance. Under Goldman's leadership, the company was named by the Chicago Sun-Times as "the most exciting company to emerge in Chicago since John Cusack's New Criminals"; by the New York Times as "one of Chicago's top theater companies"; and, after the company's move to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, by The Spectator as "the region's leading producer of cutting-edge work." In addition to having led the company for 15 years through more than 60 productions, he has directed Off-Broadway, internationally, and worked regularly as a director and adapter/playwright with leading regional theatres such as Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, Lincoln Center, Arena Stage, Folger Theater, Round House, Theater J, Everyman Theater, Synetic Theater, Forum Theater, the Kennedy Center, and many others. In addition, his scholarship on the politics of adaptation and other subjects has been published in numerous journals (including South Atlantic Quarterly, Cultural Studies, and others) and in the Sage Handbook of Performance Studies, and he received the National Communication Association's Outstanding Dissertation Award. He was previously on the faculty at UNC Chapel Hill where he received the Hettleman Award for Outstanding Scholarly and Artistic Achievement, and the Chapman Family Fellowship for Distinguished Teaching and Scholarship. He is the author of more than 25 professionally produced plays and adaptations, including work published by Samuel French, and he has directed over 70 productions.

Recent projects include his hit adaptation of Lysistrata with Synetic Theater and Georgetown; Eurydice at Round House Theater; Theodore Bikel's Sholom Aleichem: Laughter through Tears, which he developed with legendary performer Bikel and is now touring internationally after successful runs Off-Broadway and at Theater J in Washington DC; his new adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis at Synetic Theater; In Darfur at Theater J; Blackbird and Shipwrecked! at Everyman Theater, As You Like It at the Folger Theater, his adaptation of Studs Terkel's Will the Circle Be Unbroken at Steppenwolf (with David Schwimmer), at Millennium Park in Chicago (with Garrison Keillor) and in North Carolina and DC at Georgetown with Arena Stage (with David Strathairn), bobrauschenbergamerica at Forum Theater, as well as extensive new work development with Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Arena Stage, Steppenwolf, Theater J, Syracuse Stage, National New Play Network, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, Timeline Theater, the Source Festival, the GUMBO Festival, and others.

Among his published/produced plays and adaptations are Haymarket Eight (with Jessica Thebus) which premiered at Steppenwolf; Right as Rain, a new play about Anne Frank and the Holocaust that toured nationally for 3 years; and numerous award-winning adaptations, all of which he also staged, including A Death in the Family (Jeff Cited for Best New Work/Adaptation), Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (voted Independent Award for Best of the Decade 2000-2009), Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Kaddish for Allen Ginsberg, The Turn of the Screw, Divine Days, and many others.

Other professional directing highlights include his Jeff-Award winning Hamlet, The Seagull, the US Premiere of Helene Cixous' epic The Perjured City, or the Awakening of the Furies; DeLillo's Mao II, Brecht's Antigone, Lorca's The Public, Twelfth Night, Chicago's long-running comedy hit Night of the Mime, Tales of the Lost Formicans, The Fever, the off-Broadway and internationally-touring hit Sholom Aleichem: Now You're Talking, and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992.

At Georgetown, he has directed his World Premiere multimedia play A Child Shall Lead Them: Making The Night of the Hunter, based on the classic 1955 film (a co-production with University of Maryland); The Glass Menagerie and related original works (Elegy for Rose, and The Menagerie Variations) devised from the Williams archive, as well as a star-studded concert version of CAMINO REAL in Gaston Hall on Williams' 100th birthday, as part of the Tennessee Williams Centennial festival at GU and Arena Stage; a new adaptation of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author; The Winter's Tale, the DC Premieres of Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice and David Hare's Stuff Happens, Right as Rain, Skin of Our Teeth, and a new version of Our Town (with Sarah Marshall) in partnership with Duke Ellington School of the Arts.

He is increasingly engaged in global performance and its intersection with cultural diplomacy and peace-building. In Summer 2010 he led his Georgetown students as the sole US representatives at the UNESCO/ITI World Festival of Theater Schools in Peru, creating the original work In Search of Duende: The Ballad of Federico Garcia Lorca, and he is the North American representative on the board of the UNESCO/ITI World Conference of Theater School Directors. In September, 2011 he was US Delegate at the ITI World Congress in Xiamen, China, and he has also been funded for international travel and work with the Center for International Theater Development, among dozens of grants to support his work.

As Artistic Director of the Davis Performing Arts Center he has been proud to oversee numerous world premieres, to produce the nationally-acclaimed Tennessee Williams Centennial Festival (in partnership with the American Studies Program) which featured over 30 events and played to audiences over 5,000 people at Georgetown and Arena Stage, and to host and collaborate with world-class artists such as Edward Albee, Belarus Free Theater, Dah Teatar from Belgrade, Ping Chong & Company, The Civilians, Heather Raffo, Moises Kaufman and Tectonic Theater Project, Michael Rohd and Sojourn Theater, Danny Hoch, Theodore Bikel, John Waters, Michael Kahn, Joy Zinoman, David Strathairn, Kathleen Chalfant, Sister Helen Prejean, Target Margin Theater, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, Robin Becker Dance, and dozens of others.

He received his Ph. D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and has developed and teaches courses in Performance in Society: Global Performance, Civic Imagination, and Cultural Diplomacy; Political Theater; Directing; Adaptation and Performance of Literature; Acting Shakespeare; Comedy; Narrative in Fiction and Film, and many additional special topics courses. At Georgetown, he is a member of the Affiliated Faculty in the American Studies Program and the Film and Media Studies Program.

Current/ upcoming projects include directing Tarell Alvin McCraney's The Brothers Size at Everyman Theater in Baltimore; writing and directing Begotten, a new work about Eugene O'Neill, a GU-Arena partnership event to premiere at Arena Stage as part of their O'Neill Festival; and hosting twelve students and three faculty from Baghdad University for a month-long residency in May-June 2012, along with an international convening at Georgetown "Toward an Initiative on Global Performance, Civic Imagination, and Cultural Diplomacy."