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ABOUT US:

LEADERSHIP

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR, Robert Hupp

Robert Hupp is in his sixth season as artistic director of Syracuse Stage. He recently directed Annapurna, Talley’s Folly, Amadeus, Noises Off, Next to Normal, and The Three Musketeers for Stage. Prior to coming to central New York, Robert spent seventeen seasons as the producing artistic director of Arkansas Repertory Theatre in Little Rock. He directed over 30 productions for Arkansas Rep ranging from Hamlet to Les Miserables to The Grapes of Wrath. In New York City, Robert directed the American premieres of Glyn Maxwell’s The Lifeblood and Wolfpit for the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble. He also served for nine seasons as the artistic director of the Obie Award-winning Jean Cocteau Repertory. At the Cocteau, Robert’s directing credits include works by Buchner, Wilder, Cocteau, Shaw, Wedekind and the premieres of the Bentley/Milhaud version of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, and Eduardo de Filippo’s Napoli Millionaria. He has held faculty positions at Pennsylvania’s Dickinson College and, in Arkansas, at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and Hendrix College. Robert served as vice president of the Board of Directors of the Theatre Communications Group and has served on funding panels for the New York State Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, the Theatre Communications Group, the New Jersey State Council of the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. While in Arkansas, Robert was named both Non-Profit Executive of the Year by the Arkansas Business Publishing Group, and Individual Artist of the year by the Arkansas Arts Council. He and his wife Clea ride herd over a blended family of five children, one dog, and two cats.

MANAGING DIRECTOR, Jill A. Anderson

Jill A. Anderson has served as managing director of Syracuse Stage since 2016. Jill is responsible for Stage’s nearly $6.5 million operating budget and has oversight of fundraising, marketing, and operational matters within the organization. Prior to joining Stage, Jill spent a decade as general manager at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, CT. During her tenure, the O’Neill completed a $7 million capital campaign and campus expansion, doubled its operating budget, and was honored with a 2015 National Medal of Arts and the 2010 Regional Theatre Tony Award. Under the O’Neill’s aegis, Jill also developed the Baltic Playwrights Conference, an annual international new play development retreat held in Hiiumaa, Estonia. Previously, Jill spent five years in the production office at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage, after working as a stage manager in Minnesota, New Mexico, and Massachusetts. In addition to her work at Stage, Jill is an instructor in the Theater Management program of the Syracuse University Department of Drama, building on her work with high school and college students elsewhere, including at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. Jill was recognized as part of the Central New York Business Journal’s “40 Under Forty” awards in 2017 and has served on numerous municipal and non-profit boards. Jill is delighted to call Central New York home, but will always be a proud cheesehead, originally hailing from Marshfield, Wisconsin. 

ASSOCIATE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR, Melissa Crespo

Melissa Crespo is a director of new plays, musicals and opera. Upcoming: world premiere of Selena Maria Sings by Miriam Gonzalez, music by Daniel J. French (Childsplay & Magik Theatre) andYoga Playby Dipika Guha (Syracuse Stage). As a playwright, her play Egress, co-written with Sarah Saltwick, will receive an NNPN rolling world premiere starting this Fall. Fellowships and residencies include: Time Warner Fellow (WP Theatre), Usual Suspect (NYTW), The Director’s Project (Drama League), Van Lier Directing Fellow (Second Stage Theatre), and the Allen Lee Hughes Directing Fellow (Arena Stage). Melissa received her M.F.A. in directing from The New School for Drama. She is a founding editor of 3Views on Theater and was featured in the 2020 Broadway Women’s Fund “Women to Watch on Broadway”. https://www.melissacrespo.com 

RESIDENT PLAYWRIGHT, Kyle Bass

Kyle Bass is the author of the play Possessing Harriet, commissioned by the Onondaga Historical Association, which received its world premiere at Syracuse Stage in 2018, was subsequently produced at Franklin Stage Company, and will be produced at the East Lynn Theater Company in 2022. His new plays are salt/city/blues, which will have its world premiere at Syracuse Stage in 2022, Citizen James, or The Young Man Without A Country, a one-man show on James Baldwin, commissioned by Syracuse Stage, which streamed in 2021 and will tour live in 2022, and the libretto for Libba Cotton: Here This Day, a new opera based on the life of American folk music legend Libba Cotten, commissioned by The Society for New Music. Kyle’s other full-length plays include Tender Rain, Bleecker Street, Baldwin vs. Buckley: The Faith of Our Fathers, which has been presented at Cornell University, Colgate University, the University of Delaware, and will be presented at Syracuse University in September 2021, and Separated, a documentary theatre piece about the student military veterans at Syracuse University, which was presented at Syracuse Stage and the Paley Center in New York. With National Medal of Arts recipient Ping Chong, Kyle is the co-author of Cry for Peace: Voices from the Congo, which had its world premiere at Syracuse Stage and was subsequently produced at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York. Kyle has also written for Noh theatre under commission by Theatre Nohgaku. Kyle is the co-author of the original screenplay for the film Day of Days (Broad Green Pictures, 2017), which stars award-winning veteran actor Tom Skerritt, and the author of the screenplay Abundance, an adaptation of the novel Milk by Darcy Steinke. As dramaturg Kyle worked with acclaimed visual artist and Mac- Arthur Fellow Carrie Mae Weems on her theatre piece Grace Notes: Reflections for Now, which had its world premiere at the 2016 Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina, subsequently produced at Yale Rep and the Kennedy Center, and he was script consulted on the Broadway-bound Thoughts of a Colored Man, which premiered at Syracuse Stage in 2019. Kyle’s plays and other writings have appeared in the journals Callaloo, Folio, and Stone Canoe, among others, and in the essay anthology, Alchemy of the Word: Writers Talk about Writing. Kyle is the founding curator of Syracuse Stage’s annual Cold Read Festival of New Plays, which has hosted some of the country’s most-produced playwrights, including Larissa FastHorse and Kate Hamill. He has also served Syracuse Stage as literary manager and resident dramaturg and received the 2021 Impact Award as Artist as Manager, presented by the Arts Administration Program at Le Moyne College. After five seasons as associate artistic director at Syracuse Stage, Kyle was recently announced as the theatre’s first-ever resident playwright. Kyle is assistant professor in the Department of Theater at Colgate University, where he previously served as the Burke Endowed Chair for Regional Studies. Previously, Kyle was faculty in the M.F.A. Creative Writing program at Goddard College from 2006 to 2018, taught playwriting in Syracuse University’s Department of Drama and at Hobart & William Smith Colleges, and was the 2019/20 Susan P. Stroman Visiting Playwright at the University of Delaware. A two-time recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship (for fiction in 1998, for playwriting in 2010), a finalist for the Princess Grace Playwriting Award, and Pushcart Prize nominee, Kyle holds an M.F.A. in playwriting from Goddard College, is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild of America and is represented by The Barbara Hogenson Agency.