Illinois Shakespeare Festival Names New Artistic Director

Date: 8/15/06
Contact: Michael R. Baffes, ISF director of Marketing, (309) 438-8974
 

Shakespeare scholar and acclaimed theatre director Alec Wild has been appointed artistic director of the Illinois Shakespeare Festival. The appointment comes with dual responsibility as a professor of Theatre in the Directing Program at Illinois State University.

Wild will immediately begin the preliminary stages of planning next summer's 30th anniversary season of the Festival. He replaces Calvin MacLean, who this summer was named head of the theatre department at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

"It's a tremendous honor for me to be selected as the new artistic director of the Illinois Shakespeare Festival," Wild said. "My family and I have heard wonderful things about Bloomington-Normal and we are very excited about becoming part of such an active and vibrant community."

A bachelor of fine arts degree graduate in acting from Chicago's Goodman School of Drama, Wild was founder and artistic director of the critically acclaimed, award-winning Folio Theater in Chicago. Then he obtained an MFA degree in directing from the Yale School of Drama.

In 1997, Wild was the recipient of a Fox Fellowship, which took him to Saint Petersburg, Russia, to work as the assistant director of The Revizor Project, an international, cross-cultural effort to examine the work of Vsevolod Meyerhold, and to re-create Meyerhold's seminal 1926 production of Gogol's The Inspector General. While in Russia, Wild studied directing and biomechanics at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Theater.

Most recently, he has directed the critically acclaimed "The Taming of the Shrew" at the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles, "Titus Andronicus" and "Richard II" for Milwaukee Shakespeare, "MacBeth" for the UMN/Guthrie Training Program, and "The Winter's Tale" and "Richard III" at The Great River Shakespeare Festival. His teaching experience includes the American Conservatory's Advanced Training Program in San Francisco, University of Minnesota/Guthrie Conservatory, Fordham University and Manhattanville College in New York. Wild was a guest lecturer on Shakespeare at New York University, and was an adjunct professor in the Theater Department at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.