Gideon Lester

Gideon Lester is Professor of Theater and Performance; Director, Theater Programs at Bard College. He Previously taught at Harvard, where he was a Fulbright and Frank Knox Scholar; and Columbia University School of the Arts, where he founded the Arts Collaboration Lab in association with Performance Space 122. Cocurator of Crossing the Line, a transdisciplinary arts festival in New York City, he has also served as acting artistic director, associate artistic director, and resident dramaturg at the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and as director of A.R.T.’s graduate program in dramaturgy at the A.R.T./Moscow Art Theater Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard. He has worked with leading American and international artists, including Anne Bogart ’74, Chen Shi-Zheng, Peter Sellars, Anna Deavere Smith, Robert Woodruff, and Anne Washburn. Translations for the stage include plays by Marivaux, Büchner, and Brecht; stage adaptations include Kafka’s Amerika and Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire. At Bard, he is director of the undergraduate Theater and Performance Program and curator of the professional Fisher Center and SummerScape theater and dance offerings.