Instructor Bio – Joseph Megel
JOSEPH MEGEL is artist in residence in Performance Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he directs the Process Series: New Works in Development. Mr. Megel has spent the last 25 years focusing on the direction and development of new works for theatre and film. He is Co-Artistic Director of StreetSigns Center for Literature and Performance, Associate Artistic Director of the Teatro Latino/a Series, and continues to serve as Co-Executive Director of Harland’s Creek Productions, producer of premieres of new plays, developmental producer of screenplays and readings and producer of short films. Previously, he served as Artistic Director of Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey and Theatre of N.O.T.E. and Words Across Cultures in Los Angeles.
For the past three years, Megel was a resident artist in the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP) where he continued his collaboration with playwright Christine Evans and digital media designer Jared Mezzocchi on You are Dead. You are Here. This piece was developed in the Process Series and premiered in New York City at HERE in June of 2013. His short film About Time is currently making the festival rounds and has been screened at several festivals and series, including the San Antonio Film Festival and the Fort Myers Beach Film Festival. It will shortly be screened at the Long Island Film Festival.
Other recent directorial credits include Boged: An Enemy of the People (an Israeli adaptation of the Ibsen play) at Theatre J/Georgetown University in Washington, DC; The Brothers Size at ManBites Dog Theatre in Durham, North Carolina; Athol Fugard’s Blood Knot and Poetic Portraits of a Revolution with the Sacrificial Poets produced by StreetSigns at The ArtsCenter; Menagerie Variations (devised from early drafts of The Glass Menagerie) at Arena Stage in D.C.; Elisabeth Lewis Corley’s adaptation of The Miser at Duke University; Derek Goldman’s adaptation of Studs Terkel’s Will The Circle Be Unbroken in Chapel Hill, NC and Washington, DC (starring David Strathairn, Theodore Bikel, and Kathleen Chalfant).
He directed Guillermo Reyes’s Men on the Verge of Hispanic Breakdown in its Off Broadway and Los Angeles productions, winning the Outer Critics Circle Award Off Broadway and the Ovation award in LA and Jennifer Maisel’s The Last Seder at EST West in LA, Theatre J in Washington, DC, and The Organic Theatre in Chicago, the latter supported by a grant from the Kennedy Center’s Fund for New American Plays. He is a member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.