Diane Paulus

Diane Paulus (she/her) is the Terrie and Bradley Bloom Artistic Director of American Repertory Theater at Harvard University. At A.R.T. she has directed productions of Becoming a Man, 1776, WILD: A Musical Becoming, Gloria: A Life, Jagged Little Pill (currently on North American Tour), ExtraOrdinary, The White Card, In the Body of the World, Waitress, Crossing, Finding Neverland, Witness Uganda, Pippin, The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess (Tony Award, Best Revival; NAACP Award, Best Direction), Prometheus Bound, Death and the Powers: The Robots’ Opera, Crossing, Best of Both Worlds, The Donkey Show. She will direct Romeo and Juliet in fall 2024 and is currently developing Dive (previously known as Shimcheong: A Folktale) with Julia Riew and Diana Son. Broadway credits include 1776; Jagged Little Pill; Waitress; Pippin (Tony Awards for Best Revival and Best Director); Finding Neverland; The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess (Tony Award for Best Revival, NAACP Award for Best Direction); and HAIR (Tony Award for Best Revival). Her West End credits include Waitress and HAIR. Her off-Broadway credits include Gloria: A Life at the Daryl Roth Theatre; In the Body of the World (Drama League nomination) at Manhattan Theatre Club; and Invisible Thread at Second Stage. Other work includes Cirque du Soleil’s Amaluna, Invisible Thread at Second Stage, and The Public Theater’s Tony Award-winning revival of HAIR on Broadway and London’s West End. As an opera director her credits include Carmen at the 2024 Glyndenbourne Festival, The Magic Flute, the complete Monteverdi cycle, the trio of Mozart-Da Ponte operas, and Olga Neuwirth’s Lost Highway. She will direct the world premiere of The Monkey King by Huang Ro and David Henry Hwang at the San Francisco Opera in 2025. She is Professor of the Practice of Theater in Harvard University’s English Department and Department of Theater, Dance & Media. She was selected for Boston Magazine’s 2023, 2022, 2020, and 2018 lists of Boston’s most influential people, the 2014 Time 100, Time magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world, and as one of Variety’s “Trailblazing Women in Entertainment for 2014.”