Anna D Shapiro

Anna D. Shapiro was nominated for a 2011 Tony Award for her production of Stephen Adly Guirgis’ award-winning play, The Motherfucker with the Hat, which she also directed at Steppenwolf to critical acclaim. She received the 2008 Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Best Direction of a Play for Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s production of August: Osage County by Tracy Letts. Shapiro’s work can currently be seen on Broadway in the critically acclaimed revival of Steppenwolf’s production of This Is Our Youth by Kenneth Lonergan. Upcoming projects include the world premiere of Larry David’s Fish in the Dark on Broadway. Last season, Shapiro directed the Broadway revival of Of Mice and Men, which National Theatre Live selected as the first American production to be broadcast to over 700 cinemas across the US and Canada. She has been affiliated with Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago since 1995, serving as the original director of the New Plays Lab, later joining the artistic staff as Resident Director, Associate Artist and, since 2005, as an Ensemble member where her directing credits include A Parallelogram, Up, The Crucible, The Unmentionables, the world premiere of The Pain and the Itch (also at Playwrights Horizons in New York), I Never Sang for My Father, the world premiere of Man from Nebraska, (named by TIME Magazine as one of the Year’s Top Ten of 2003), The Drawer Boy, Side Man (also in Ireland, Australia and Vail, Colorado), Three Days of Rain and the world premiere of The Infidel, among others. She recently staged Tracy Letts’ version of The Three Sisters at Steppenwolf in the summer of 2012. Other directing credits include Domesticated (Lincoln Center Theatre), A Parallelogram (Mark Taper Forum), A Number (American Conservatory Theatre), The Drawer Boy (Paper Mill Playhouse), Iron (Manhattan Theatre Club), A Fair Country (Huntington Theatre, Boston) and Trafficking in Broken Hearts for Atlantic Theater Company. Shapiro is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama and Columbia College and the recipient of a 1996 Princess Grace Award, as well as the 2010 Princess Grace Statue Award. She is a professor in Northwestern University’s Department of Theatre and has served as the Director of the Graduate MFA Directing Program since 2002.