Jody McAuliffe

Jody McAuliffe (MFA, Yale University) is a director and writer. Her literary nonfiction work, The Mythical Bill, A Neurological Memoir, came out in spring of 2013 from University of Iowa Press Sightline Series. Most recently, she directed the world premiere of Neal Bell's Now You See Me for Manbites Dog Theater and The Birthday Party (Best Direction, Independent) for Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern. She is a co-convener of the working group Performance & Integrated Media, a recipient of a Humanities Writ Large Mellon grant and a Trinity College Distinguished Teaching Award. Other publications include: Gulag Follies in Images of Ethics & Pain (Routledge 2012), My Lovely Suicides (a novel) (2007) Crimes of Art and Terror (with Frank Lentricchia, 2003); Mysterious Actions: New American Drama, Guest Editor, South Atlantic Quarterly (2000); Plays, Movies, and Critics, Editor (1993). Adaptations: The Italian Actress; My Lovely Suicides (Semi-Finalist, Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Center National Playwrights Conference), Manbites Dog Theater Other Voices Series. Literary criticism: Journal of Modern Literature; South Atlantic Quarterly; Reflections on a Director's Process, afterword to The New Trial, by Peter Weiss (2001). Fiction: South Atlantic Quarterly; Literary Imagination; Southwest Review. Former National Endowment for the Arts Directing Fellow at the Mark Taper Forum, she has developed and directed new plays nationally and regionally: Marlane Meyer’s The Mystery of Attraction, Pacific Playwrights Festival, South Coast Repertory, and The Rule of Fate at Manbites Dog Theater; Neal Bell's "Shadow of Himself," New Play Summit, Denver Center Theater. In New York, she directed the English-language premiere of Heiner Muller’s Philoctetes; on the west coast she directed Sleeping Dogs by Neal Bell at Mark Taper Forum and Haut Gout by Allan Havis at South Coast Repertory; on the east coast Otherwise Engaged and The Road to Mecca for Virginia Stage Company, The Front Page for North Carolina Shakespeare Festival; regionally, world premieres at Burning Coal (Lydia Stryk’s Safe House) and Manbites Dog Theater (Neal Bell’s Somewhere in the Pacific). As part of Duke Previews, a professional producing entity, she developed and directed Nilo Cruz’s Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams, Megan Mostyn-Brown’s Going After Alice, and her own adaptation of Don DeLillo’s Mao II, a multimedia premiere starring Fred Neumann of Mabou Mines. She has developed and directed new plays at Sundance Institute, L.A. Theatre Center, Old Globe, and Bay Area Playwrights Festival at the Magic Theater. She directed her translation of Andreyev's He Who Gets Slapped and her translation/adaptation of Gogol's Inspector General--The Special Prosecutor-- at Duke, and developed her translations of Andreyev's The Idea and Chekhov's Seagull with New York Theatre Workshop. As a member of the Directing Workshop for Women at American Film Institute, she wrote, produced and directed a short film, My Man Ray, screened at AFI and festivals on both coasts. Her documentary short about a gulag survivor, Rodina, screened at Duke and her documentary short with Elizabeth Davis, Goin’ A Buffalo, screened at Center For Documentary Studies. She has been a regular reviewer of New York theatre for The Norwegian Shakespeare and Theatre Magazine. A member of Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, she is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama.