Cynthia Croot
Cynthia Croot is Assistant Professor and incoming Chair of Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh. She earned her MFA in Directing from Columbia University under the tutelage of Anne Bogart, Robert Woodruff, Andrei Serban, and Kristin Linklater. U.S. directing credits include Perseverance Theatre, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival and the Stonington Opera House as well as productions in NYC at PS122, HERE, Town Hall, The Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, Symphony Space, and the Guggenheim Museum. She was a 2007-2009 Fellow of the NEA/TCG Career Development Program for Directors.
Croot is also Resident Director of the NYC-based theatre company Conni's Avant Garde Restaurant, staging experimental audience-immersive and site-specific work in NYC, at the Cleveland Public Theatre; The Motherlodge Festival, Louisville, KY; North American Culture Lab, NY; and American Repertory Theatre’s "Club Oberon" in Cambridge, MA. Croot’s direction helped earn the company a “Top-Ten 2012 Performance” accolade from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and two 2012 New York Innovative Theatre Awards.
Among her international credits, Croot toured Suzan-Lori Park’s Venus in Cape Town and Johannesburg during the historic moment of Sara Baartman's repatriation and burial. Her benefit U.S. stagings of Venus at the Public Theater and Gatehouse featured Tim Robbins, Joe Morton, Jayne Houdyshell, Arliss Howard and Kathleen Chalfant. In 2008 she received a TCG/ITI travel grant for another incarnation of the Venus Project: examining the sex trafficking industry in Croatia.
In 2004/5 she represented U.S. artists in a delegation to Damascus, Syria. Organized by the Center for International Conflict Resolution and U.S. State Department, the exchange galvanized her commitment to cross-cultural understanding forged through the arts and media. Croot was a guest speaker at the Fadjr International Theatre Festival in Tehran. A member of ArtUp's Sites of Passage, in collaboration with artists from the US, Israel and Palestine. She subsequently led an examination of displaced peoples across campuses in the US and UK entitled: Taking Refuge.
Recent work includes Recoil, a devised piece about gun violence created in collaboration with students from the University of Pittsburgh at the at the Smithsonian American History Museum ACCelerate Festival, and Mirror Butterfly, a jazz opera which performed at the Kennedy Center MillenniumStage.