Laurie woolery

Laurie Woolery is an OBIE award winning director, playwright, producer, cultural organizer, and citizen artist who works at the intersection of theater and civic engagement based in New York and Los Angeles. She has worked in theaters local, regional, and international such as The Public Theater, National Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Yale Repertory, Weiwuying National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, Trinity Repertory, Goodman Theatre, Cornerstone Theater Company, and South Coast Repertory. Projects include the world premiere of Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Manahatta at The Public, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Yale Repertory Theater. Laurie has a long history of working on new plays with notable playwrights like Tanya Saracho, Charise Castro Smith, Marisela Trevino Orta, Aditi Brennan Kapil, Vauhini Vara, Maria Irene Fornes, Julie Marie Myatt, Julia Cho, KJ Sanchez, Alison Carey, etc. Her musical adaptations of Shakespeare plays such as As You Like It co-created with Shaina Taub and The Tempest with Benjamin Velez received world premieres at The Public’s Delacorte Theater. In 2020 as a response to the global pandemic and antiracist uprising, Laurie produced the documentary Under The Greenwood Tree that tells the story of how the Public Works community banded together during this global crisis while simultaneously curating a community public art installation The Seed Project on the façade of The Public Theater that featured 164 Public Works community members sharing their hopes for the future. Laurie has a long history developing new work with diverse communities ranging from incarcerated women, veterans, domestic workers, immigrants, and intergenerational communities as well as residents of a Kansas town devastated by a tornado. She creates site-specific work ranging from a working sawmill in Eureka to the banks of the Los Angeles River. For over a decade, Laurie served as Director of Public Works at The Public Theater, a program that seeks to engage the people of New York by making them creators and not just spectators, by building, codifying, and writing the Public Works Playbook which shares the methodology. Laurie is the former Associate Artistic Director of Cornerstone Theater Company and Conservatory Director at South Coast Repertory. Laurie is a former board member of the Network of Ensemble Theaters. Laurie is founding member of The Sol Project, 2020 United States Artist recipient, 2021 Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellow, and was named Person of the Year at the 2022 National Theatre Conference.