Directors in Conversation: Ways of Making

Join these three innovative, iconoclastic directors for a conversation about they make work. We'll discuss their individual practices and how they developed, areas of overlap and divergence, and how you begin (and end!) a piece of theatre at all! Moderated by Mercury Store Executive Director Claudia Zelevansky.

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David Herskovits

David Herskovits (he/him) is the Founding Artistic Director of Target Margin Theater. He has directed a broad range of work, classics and neglected older work, new opera and music-theater, and adaptations of history and literature, for TMT and other theaters, festivals, and universities all over, including The Spoleto Festival USA, Theatre for A New Audience, Lincoln Center Festival, The Bonn Biennale, The Kitchen, Mass MoCA, and many others. His Target Margin works have won multiple OBIEs and been presented nationally and internationally. David has taught and lectured at The Mahindra Humanities Center and The Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard, Yale, Williams, Wesleyan, The University of Nebraska, The School of Visual Art in Jerusalem, Juilliard, and other Universities and drama schools. He has written for The New York Times, American Theatre, Theatre Magazine, and Performing Arts Journal, among others.

Aya Ogawa

Aya Owaga (they/them) is an award-winning Tokyo-born, Brooklyn-based theater-maker whose work centers women/non-binary perspectives and utilizes the stage as a space for exploring cultural identity and the immigrant experience. They have devised, written and directed many plays including oph3lia (HERE), Journey to the Ocean (Foundry Theatre) and Ludic Proxy (The Play Company). They received an Obie Award for The Nosebleed (Lincoln Center Theater) which subsequently ran at Woolly Mammoth Theatre (2023) and toured to Walker Art Center, REDCAT and Wexner Center for the Arts (2024). They directed Haruna Lee’s Obie Award-winning Suicide Forest (The Bushwick Starr; Ma-Yi Theatre Company, 2019 & 2020) and Maiko Kikuchi and Spencer Lott’s 9000 Paper Balloons (HERE & Japan Society 2021 & 2022). Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting (2023); Cullman Award for Extraordinary Creativity, Lincoln Center Theater (2022-23); Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2023); The Playwrights’ Center’s National Residency & Commission (2022-23); President’s Award in Performing Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2015); Resident playwright, New Dramatists; MacDowell Fellow.

Rubén Polendo

Rubén Polendo (he/him) is Founding Artistic Director of Theater Mitu. Driven by a commitment to innovation, Mitu has earned a wide reputation as an adventuresome and dynamic artist-led company. Committed to challenging inherited parameters of theater research and practice, Polendo’s work with Mitu is situated in the tension between acting and performance, theatrical design and installation, multimedia and interactive technology. Mitu’s considerable body of work has taken on a variety of forms: developmental and production work with some of the world’s leading art innovators, research and pedagogical work with renowned universities and conservatories, and international trainings and research initiatives with leaders in the field. Theater Mitu is housed in its own interdisciplinary arts space, MITU580, in Gowanus, Brooklyn. This former glass recycling facility is a unique gathering place where transdisciplinary arts practice is interrogated, incubated, and produced. Polendo is a professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where he currently serves as Director of The Innovation Studio and Associate Dean for the Institute of Performing Arts.

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