December 1, 2011

Bill Rauch

Bill Rauch co-founded Cornerstone in 1986 and has directed over 40 of the company’s productions, including the majority of the company’s community collaborations nationwide. In 2007, he was named Artistic Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where he has directed the world premiere of Bill Cain’s Equivocation, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, The Music Man, Handler, The Clay Cart and many others. He has also directed at regional theaters across the country including the Lincoln Center Theater, Yale Repertory, Guthrie Theatre, Arena Stage, South Coast Repertory, Long Wharf Theatre and Great Lakes Theater Festival. For his directorial efforts, Bill has received L.A. Weekly, Drama-Logue, Garland and Helen Hayes Awards, Connecticut Critics Circle Award (for Best Direction), and has been twice nominated for the Ovation Award for Best Director. From 1992 to 1998, he served on the Board of Directors of Theatre Communications Group, the national service organization for non-profit theater (two years as a member of the Executive Committee). He graduated from Harvard College in 1984 where he received the Louis Sudler Prize for outstanding graduating artist. He has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, The Durfee Foundation and the Playwrights Center and Keynote Speaker for Theatre Puget Sound’s inaugural conference and has testified before Congress in support of the NEA. Bill is the only artist to have received the inaugural Leadership for a Changing World Award. In October of 2008 he was named a United States Artists Prudential Fellow, and is the recipient of the 2009 Margo Jones Medal. In 2010 he was a Panelist for the Fund for National Projects, Doris Duke Foundation. He is an Associate Artist at Yale Repertory Theater and South Coast Repertory and was a Claire Trevor Professor of Drama at University of California, Irvine during the 2006-2007 academic year.