Department of Performing Arts

Derek Goldman is Artistic Director of the Davis Performing Arts Center and Associate Professor of Theater and Performance Studies. 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. In addition his scholarship on the politics of adaptation and other subjects has been published in numerous journals and in the Sage Handbook of Performance Studies, and he received the National Communication Association's Outstanding Dissertation Award. At UNC Chapel Hill 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 20 professionally produced plays and adaptations, including work published by Samuel French, and he has directed over 50 productions. Among his published/produced plays and adaptations are Haymarket Eight, 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, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 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 Cixous' epic The Perjured City, DeLillo's Mao II, Brecht's Antigone, Lorca's The Public, and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. Recent projects include his adaptation of Lysistrata with Synetic Theater and Georgetown; Theodore Bikel's Sholom Aleichem: Laughter through Tears, which he developed with legendary performer Bikel and is now running in New York as part of an international tour after a record-breaking run at Theater J in Washington DC; 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), and a workshop of the new jazz musical My Swan: The Passions of F. Scott Fitzgerald (created with recording artist Nancy Harrow) at Lincoln Center, as wella s work with the Kennedy Center, Arena Stage, and others. At Georgetown, he has directed his new adaptation of 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 received his Ph. D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University. Other upcoming projects include his new adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis at Synetic Theater and In Darfur at Theater J .