Lori Leigh

Trustee

Dr. Lori Leigh is a professional director, playwright, and dramaturg and has received several awards and nominations for her work. Lori’s Shakespeare work includes directing The Two Noble Kinsmen and Romeo and Juliet at Studio 77, Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing for Shakespeare Globe Centre’s NSSP, and This Fair Verona, an improvised adaptation of Romeo and Juliet for PlayShop at BATS Theatre. As a dramaturg, Lori has worked on the award-winning Shakespeare productions of Bright Orange Walls including A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2015) and Twelfth Night (2016), and also Auckland Theatre Company’s production of Romeo and Juliet directed by Willem Wassenaar. For Summer Shakespeare, Lori directed The Winter’s Tale (2011), was dramaturg for The Comedy of Errors (2018), and assistant directed and dramaturged the female-led Hamlet in 2019.

Lori has a MFA in Theatre from Sarah Lawrence College in New York and a PhD from Victoria University of Wellington, where she is currently is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre. Lori Leigh’s research focuses on Early Modern, particularly Shakespearean, stagecraft, performance, and dramaturgy—including gender in Shakespeare, representations of gender and sexuality in theatre. Lori has published chapters and articles on Shakespeare with Oxford University Press and Shakespeare, the journal of the British Shakespeare Association. She has published a full-length book with Palgrave McMillan titled Shakespeare and the Embodied Heroine. Her most recent publication is a chapter on queenship and theatricality in the Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare’s Queens, 2018.  She is currently working on a book on Shakespeare and kissing.