Jean Randich is a writer, director, and teacher who has been developing and directing new work and re-envisioning classic plays and musical theater for over thirty years. She has created work for En Garde Arts, New Georges, NAATCO, the Flea Theater, the Asia Society, and the Pearl Theatre in NYC, as well as at the Yale Repertory Theater, Connecticut Repertory Theater, Nevada Conservatory Theater, Portland Stage Company, and the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. Ms. Randich has served as the George Abbott Resident Director at New Dramatists, NYC. With Robert Murphy, Ms. Randich is co-founder and Artistic Director of Collider Theater, whose mission is to explore collisions of cultures and the power of theater to speak truth to a fractured world.
Ms. Randich has also directed in Germany and Norway and served as the American Juror at the 15th session of the Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theater. She was commissioned by the Dallas Opera to write the libretto for a chamber opera, The Miraculous Phonograph Record. With Anna Maria Hong, Jean adapted Ms. Hong’s novella, “H & G,” into a new work of multimedia music theater, “H & G, a great and terrible story” with music by Allen Shawn and projections by Sue Rees. Recently Jean collaborated with Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig to present a workshop production of a new play, “Unibeauty and her Wicked Daughters,” a dark comedy about the corporate hijacking of the 14th Amendment. Ms. Randich works in many genres from jazz concert to Shakespeare to new plays to physical theater; the work is marked by her eye for the unexpected and surprising.
Ms. Randich was nominated for the 2018 Connecticut Broadway World Award for Best Direction of a Play for Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” at the Connecticut Repertory Theater. She has received an NEA/TCG Director Fellowship, a Fox Foundation Grant to work at the National Theatre in Oslo, Norway, and a Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Grant. Ms. Randich has an MA in Creative Writing from Brown University and an MFA in Directing from the David Geffen Yale School of Drama. Ms. Randich has written reviews for truthdig.com and teaches at Bennington College and NYU Tisch School of the Arts.