Jessica Holt Director
JESSICA HOLT (she/hers) is a queer female director equally as at home directing new and contemporary plays and musicals as she is reinvestigating classics for what they have to say to us here, now, today. She gravitates towards stories of consequences and believes that theater has the power to radically transform our lives and our communities.
Directing credits include: Sense & Sensibility by Kate Hamill (The Cape Playhouse), The Great Leap by Lauren Yee (OKC Rep), Fun Home (River & Rail Theatre), The Code by The Kilbanes (a new pop-rock musical), Ironbound by Martyna Majok (A.C.T.), The Thanksgiving Play, Something Delightful, Sense and Sensibility, Fun Home, Venus in Fur (Virginia Stage Company), The Resting Place, Bright Half Life, Taylor Mac's The Lily's Revenge, Act 5 (Magic Theatre), Speech and Debate (Barrington Stage Company), Rich Girl (Florida Studio Theatre), The Daughters by Patricia Cotter (San Francisco Playhouse), and Ugly Lies the Bone by Lindsey Ferrentino (Alliance Theater), among others.
Additionally, she has developed and directed work at A.C.T., Cape Cod Theatre Project, Santa Cruz Shakespeare, Berkeley Rep's Ground Floor, Rivendell Theatre, NYU, Pocono Mountains Music Festival, AADA, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Sewanee Writers Conference, Cutting Ball Theater, among others.
Jessica is an NNPN Affiliated artist and was 2016-2017 National Directors Fellow with the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, NNPN, the Kennedy Center, and SDCF. She was the 2015-2016 Phil Kent Directing Fellow at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, GA.
She is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, where she received her MFA in Directing. Projects there include: The Seagull by Anton Chekhov, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and the hip-hop musical The Children by Phillip Howze.
She was the Co-Artistic Director of the 2014 Yale Summer Cabaret, and programmed a season celebrating 'Voices at the Forefront of American Theatre' including work by Jackie Sibblies Drury, Will Eno and Erin Courtney.
While at YSD, she was also a co-founder, deviser and performer for Guided Tour, a site-specific, immersive live tour event, providing fictional tours of real spaces on the Yale campus in New Haven.
In June 2022, alongside Mona Mansour, she co-conceived and directed a site-specific immersive walking tour "Uncovering Downtown: A Magical Expedition of Unrecorded Dreams" for En Garde Arts in lower Manhattan.
Within the educational environment, she has directed, taught acting and coached actors, emerging directors and business leaders at schools and conservatories including American Conservatory Theater, Maggie Flanigan Studio in NYC, American Academy of Dramatic Art, NYC, The Studio/NYC, Fordham University, UC Berkeley and Stanford University, among others.
She is a proud member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, Wingspace Theatrical Design & Ring of Keys.
Photo by Edward T. Morris