Lisa Wolpe: About the Artist

 

Click here to listen to her interview.

Lisa Wolpe, actress, director, teacher and producer, is the Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, an award-winning all-female, multi-cultural theater company that she founded in 1993. Ms. Wolpe produced, directed and played Iago in “Othello” at the Theatre @ Boston Court, as well as creating Jaquis in an all-female cowboy “As You Like It” and “Shylock” in LAWSC’s production of “The Merchant of Venice,” for which the company was nominated for four Ovation Awards, including “Best Actress” for Ms. Wolpe. She has produced 14 major Shakespeare plays for LAWSC, directing 12 and starring in them all.

Los Angeles Magazine has called the LAWSC “one of the 10 coolest things to do in Los Angeles,” and the company has been featured on PBS, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS and London’s International News. Ms. Wolpe has directed 20 productions of Shakespeare’s plays and performed leading roles in 17 Shakespearean productions. She has probably played more of the Bard’s male leading roles than any woman in history and is featured in the book “Women Direct Shakespeare in America.”

Other acting and directing credits include Berkeley Repertory Theater, Shakespeare & Company, Boston Center for the Arts, Arizona Theater Company, San Diego Repertory Company, Boston Theater Works, California Shakespeare Festival, Southwest Shakespeare and Sedona Shakespeare.

She has taught and directed Shakespeare, all levels of Acting, as well as Directing courses for many theater companies and universities, including the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, USC, Cal Poly Pomona, Emerson College, Wellesley College, Boston University and MIT, and has lectured widely on cross-gender Shakespeare. Ms. Wolpe was for many years an actor, director and Master Teacher with Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass., and has taught in many other professional training programs across the country, including four years as Director of Text and Performance with the Sedona Shakespeare Institute, and  several years with Southwick Studios and Arlington Center for the Arts in Boston. In August 2001, she was invited on full scholarship to work and study at the Globe Theater in London as part of their first International Fellows Program.

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