Louis Fantasia has produced and directed more than a hundred and fifty plays and operas worldwide. Director of the Shakespeare Globe Centre's Teaching Shakespeare Through Performance Institute from 1997 to 2002, and President of Deep Springs College (2007), Louis is currently Dean of Faculty and Chair of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the New York Film Academy's Los Angeles campus, and Director of Shakespeare at the Huntington, the teacher training institute of the Huntington Library, Art Galleries and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California.
In 1993, The Los Angeles Reader called Louis Fantasia "one of L.A.'s finest directors" for his staging of the U.S. premiere of Felix Mitterer's Siberia, starring Alan Mandel. 1996, he was the first American to direct on the reconstructed London Globe stage, with a workshop production of Much Ado About Nothing. His 1991 staging of Twelfth Night, at the National Theatre of Varna, Bulgaria - the first modern dress Shakespeare and the first production by a Western director in that country - was hailed by critics as a “historic evening in Bulgarian theater.“
His recent professional productions include the U.S. premiere of Robin Soans' Arab-Israeli Cookbook (2006), and the West Coast premiere of Elise Thoron and Gary Fagin's multi-media music-theatre piece, Charlotte: Life or Theatre? (2007), and a 2009 production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, which Backstage West praised for its “unusual purity and integrity.” His own performances include the English-language premiere of Peter Turrini's monodrama, Enough, and The Double Bass, the award winning one-man play by Patrick Suskind, which Louis has performed in Berlin, London, Tokyo and across the U.S. since 1988. He was heard regularly on NPR's KCRW (89.9 FM) as a theatre critic and arts commentator. His book, Instant Shakespeare, is published in the U.S. by Ivan R. Dee and by A & C Black in England. His screenplay Demon Sword (co-written with director Paul Nicholas) was filmed in India in 2007.
Louis Fantasia has taught at the Juilliard School and the University of Southern California School of Theatre, the London Theatre School (Head of Acting and Director of Studies) and Schiller College-Europe University (Chair and Artistic Director of Theatre Programs). From 1988 to 2002, he was Education Director of the Shakespeare Globe Centre's Western Region and ran the Globe's actor/direct