Sara Holdren is a director, teacher, and writer-about-theater, originally from the Blue Ridge foothills of Virginia. She is the co-founder of the theater company/project Tiltyard, and in 2019-2020, she served as the Artistic Director of Shakespeare Academy @ Stratford. From 2017-2019 she was the theater critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com. Sara is also the recipient of the 2016-2017 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for her essay "The Revolution Will Not Be Hashtagged." During the pandemic, she has directed As You Like It at SUNY Purchase and a reading of Erin Shields's Paradise Lost for Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. She has also ridden her bike 4,000 miles across the U.S. with her partner, Beau, a writer. Pre-pandemic directing projects include Twelfth Night at Two River Theater; The Merchant of Venice with the Cleveland Play House/CWRU MFA Acting Program; The Winter's Tale with Shakespeare Academy @ Stratford; Macbeth and The Comedy of Errors with Two River Theater's A Little Shakespeare program; MIDSUMMER (which she co-adapted from the plays of William Shakespeare) with Tiltyard; Deer and the Lovers by Emily Zemba; The Zero Scenario by Ryan Campbell; and The Master and Margarita, adapted by Edward Kemp from the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov. Sara has also served as the Artistic Director of the Yale Summer Cabaret, where she directed the original production of MIDSUMMER and Sarah Ruhl's adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando. She is a Drama League Fellow and a graduate of the Acting Shakespeare program at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She has also taught acting and directing at Primary Stages' Einhorn School of the Performing Arts and at the New School's MFA Acting program. She holds a BA in Theater from Yale University and an MFA in Directing from Yale School of Drama. Some of her heroes, who have been helping her through these past two years, are: E. M. Foster, Ursula K. Le Guin, David Bowie, Hayao Miyazaki, Werner Herzog, James Baldwin, Mikhail Bulgakov, David Graeber, Buzz Goodbody, George Eliot, and, of course, Anton Chekhov, whose Three Sisters she hopes to bring to life sometime soon. She lives in Richmond, Virginia with Beau and their cat companion, Masha (who always wears black).
Sara Holdren