COLLABORATORS

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Artistic Director, Lear deBessonet

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Lear deBessonet, Director
lear.debessonet@gmail.com
917.561.8704

Lear deBessonet (Director) has been developing new works for theatre in New York since 2003 with a focus on interdisciplinary and site-specific music-theatre projects. On the Levee, her music-theatre collaboration with Marcus Gardley, Todd Almond, and visual artist Kara Walker premiered at Lincoln Center Theater's LCT3 in June 2010 (Time Out Best of 2010). In May 2009, her site-specific Don Quixote, a community-based collaboration with homeless shelter Broad Street Ministry and the punk-gypsy ensemble The Psalters, premiered in Philadelphia (Philadelphia Weekly Best of 2009). Other recent work includes a new adaptation of The Scarlet Letter by Naomi Iizuka created with violinist Todd Reynolds at the Intiman Theatre, a country-blues adaptation of Brecht's Saint Joan of the Stockyards at PS122, transfigures, produced Off-Broadway by Women's Project, and Death Might Be Your Santa Claus, a site-specific work performed at an abandoned bank next to the NY Stock Exchange. For Ten Thousand Things, she created a My Fair Lady that toured to prisons, community centers, and homeless shelters in Minneapolis (Pioneer Press's "10 Plays that Made a Difference" in 2010). International: In the Dark Ages (National Opera Theatre of Kazakhstan). She has assisted Martha Clarke, Marianne Weems, Anne Bogart, Bartlett Sher, and Theatre du Soleil, and was named one of Time Out New York's "25 People to Watch."  Upcoming: THE ODYSSEY, premiering at the Old Globe Theatre in 2011.

Ms. deBessonet created and ran the TICKETS FOR THE PEOPLE program in New York, an initiative designed to distribute 20,000 tickets to non-traditional theatre-goers including low-income individuals, immigrants, students, and seniors. In 2008, she was honored with the first annual Presidential Award for Artistic Excellence by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council alongside Mayor Bloomberg and Edward Albee. She is an alumnus of the Drama League Director's Project, the Women's Project Directors Lab, the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, and a Jefferson Scholar. A recipient of an NEA/TCG Career Development Program for Directors, she has also acted as a visiting professor at NYU-Tisch School of the Arts.

COLLABORATORS

ST. JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS

BONE PORTRAITS

DEATH MIGHT BE YOUR SANTA CLAUS

BITE YOUR TONGUE

THE ELIOTS

THE FEMALE TERRORIST PROJECT

L'HISTOIRE DU CANARD: A Surrealist History of Truth in 20th Century America

TRANSFIGURES