FACULTY & STAFF
Ellen Kaplan
Professor
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Office: Theatre 105 |  |
585–3207 |
Ellen W. Kaplan is professor of acting and directing at Smith College, and teaches acting, directing, radio drama, and performance seminars, including Shakespeare and Calderon, Eastern European Theatre, Women and War, and Staging the Jew. Currently, she is writing a book, The Ties that Bind, on Representations of Jewish Life on the American Stage.
Ellen has twice been a Fulbright Senior Scholar/Artist-in-Residence in Hong Kong, and Fulbright Scholar in Costa Rica. In Israel Ellen performed and directed at the Khan, Sherover, and Jerusalem Theatres and at Hebrew University. In 2001-02, she lived and worked in Jerusalem, teaching at Tel Aviv University and working with intercultural theatre companies around the country. Acting credits include Inhabited 98, which won a prestigious BESSIE Award, and Gloucester in King Lear with Kristen Linklater. Recent directing credits include After Mrs. Rochester by Polly Teale, and Saul Bellow: Stories on Stage, at The Egg in Albany, NY.
Her work is soon to be published in Our Lives: An Anthology of Jewish Women’s Writing and in The Deronda Review. She is co-editor of Images of Mental Illness through Text and Performance (Mellen Press, co-edited with Dr. Sarah J. Rudolph) and author of several articles on international theatre, including an essay in Spanish on the work of playwright Nora Glickman, published in Buenos Aires in 2006. Ellen is also a playwright; her play Pulling Apart was a 2004 finalist for the O'Neill Playwrights Conference, and was produced in New Haven, CT in December 2005, in a production at Southern Ct. State University, directed by Dr. Sheila Garvey. That production won the New England Moss Hart Award in 2006. Other plays have been performed at Theatre Matrix/Los Angeles, the Cleveland Public Theatre, Meredith College in Raleigh, NC, in Northampton, MA, and, internationally, in Galway, Ireland, the Jewish State Theatre of Bucharest, and in Jerusalem.
Ellen has produced two video documentaries, including Mixed Blessings, about Jews and Gypsies (Rom) in Eastern Europe, and an interactive CD-ROM on the works of Juan Rulfo. She is also active in theatre outreach activities, working with Hampden County Correctional Institute with incarcerated mothers, adolescents in Holyoke, MA, and a project with adjudicated teens to create spoken work drama for radio.
