Directors
Lily McLeish
Lily McLeish is a British-German theatre director. She is a creative fellow of the RSC, associate director to Katie Mitchell and artistic director of Fizzy Sherbet.
As Director her work includes Killing It by Josephine Starte; Scrounger by Athena Stevens nominated for 6 Off West End Awards including Best Director; dance-theatre piece While You Are Here written by Eve Leigh and choreographed by Jonathan Goddard; Schism by Athena Stevens nominated for an Olivier Award; The White Bike by Tamara von Werthern; A Colder Water Than Here by Matthew Jones, which was awarded the Origins Award For Outstanding New Work.
As Associate Director, her recent work includes Norma Jeane Baker of Troy by Anne Carson, a melologue, starring Ben Whishaw and Renée Fleming for The Shed, New York; Orlando by Virginia Woolf for the Schaubühne, Berlin; Bluets by Maggie Nelson for the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hamburg; Anatomy of a Suicide by Alice Birch for The Royal Court.
www.lilymcleish.com
Ilana Cilliers
Ilana Cilliers is a multi-award winning stage and screen actress, theatre maker, musician and educator. She studied drama from 2004-2007 at Stellenbosch University, achieving her BDrama degree, majoring in Cabaret, as well as an Honours degree in directing, both with distinction. In 2016 she was awarded the degree of Master of Arts from Rhodes University, her focus area being Contemporary Performance, also with distinction.
From 2009-2012 she was employed as full-time performer, collaborator and workshop facilitator for Ubom! Eastern Cape Drama Company, where she was involved as collaborator and performer in over 20 productions, including the Ovation-award winning Breed (2010) and Door (2012), and toured in 8 out of 9 South African provinces, as well as to Lusaka, Zambia and Harare, Zimbabwe. During her time at Ubom! she was awarded the Handspring Award for Best Puppet Manipulation at the Out the Box Puppetry and Visual Performance Festival in Cape Town for her performance as the title character in The Adventures of a Little Nobody (2010).
Other theatre highlights include Wreckage (2011), Ubom!’s collaboration with the First Physical Theatre Company, the Ovation-award-winning Machine For Living (2014), Willem Anker’s Samsa-masjien (2014/2015) under direction of Jaco Bouwer and Wolf Britz’s controversial Piekniek by Mpande neé Dingaan (2017).
As screen actress, she was awarded Best Supporting Actress at kykNet’s Silwerskerm Festival in 2016 for her performance in Christiaan Olwagen’s film, Johnny is nie Dood nie, for which she also received a SAFTA nomination in 2018. At the kykNET Silwerskerm Festival in 2016, she was nominated for Best Actress in a Short Film, for her performance in Soos Gister.
Her work as director include Buhle Ngaba’s Swan Song (2017), which was awarded the Kanna for Best Uitkampteater Production at the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival and nominated for Best Dance Production at the Free State Arts Festival (2019), and the multi-award winning GodgOdgoD (2018) co-devised with Britz as the debut work of their production company, Mount Maak. She acted as composer, musical director and/or sound designer for the above-mentioned works.
She is currently a part-time lecturer at the Open Window Institute for Film and Electronic Arts, where she teaches Screen Acting, whilst continuing to freelance within the film, television and theatre industries and making experimental work with her company, Mount Maak.
Anna Girvan
Anna Girvan is a London based director. She is originally from Newcastle and trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School for an MA in Directing. Anna is passionate about giving platforms to under-represented voices and her proudest moment was working with Young Vic Taking Part creating a piece of theatre with a company of 30 homeless people called Go Between.
As a director her work in theatre includes Our Country’s Good at Tobacco Factory Theatres, Twelfth Night at the Southwark Playhouse; Rudolf at the Midlands Arts Centre; The Internet Was Made For Adults at the Vaults Festival; Go Between, Someone Else and Room 504 at the Young Vic. She will next be directing The Invisible Man for Northern Stage.
Assistant and associate director work includes Leopoldstadt at The Wyndham; Noises Off! at The Garrick; Exit the King, The Red Lion and The Beaux’ Stratagem at the National; People, Places and Things on UK tour; Hamlet and King Lear for the RSC and on UK and US tour; Richard II at Shakespeare’s Globe and Happy Days at the Young Vic.
Sandra Theresa Buch
Sandra Theresa Buch works with a passion for new writing as a mentor, dramaturg, reader and director.
The last five years she has been head of BA in Playwriting at The Danish National School of Performing Arts. Her artistic research projects at DASPA explores frontiers of new writing with projects such as ‘performative text creation strategies’ and ‘how to write for humans and robots’.
Sandra lives in Denmark and lived in London for more than 10 years. She studied drama and rhetoric at Copenhagen University, writing and directing at RADA/Kings College, and has a diploma in script development from NFTS.
Hanna Berrigan
Hanna read English at Oxford and has an MA in Text and Performance from RADA and King’s, and an MSc in the Psychodynamics of Human Development from Birkbeck and the British Psychotherapy Foundation. She trained at the Gate Theatre under Erica Whyman and specialises in new work and non-realism.
Directing credits include: Slowly for Howard Barker’s Wrestling School (Riverside Studios); La Musica (Gate Theatre); Public Property (Trafalgar Studios – nominated for the What’s on Stage Best New Comedy Award); Dogdeath in Macedonia (RADA Festival); The Mountaintop and The Lover (Gale Theatre, Barbados), Teenager of the Year (Latitude Festival); The Bald Prima Donna and Schwarzenjammer (Etcetera); God is a DJ (Theatre 503), and Paradox (RSC Fringe Festival). She has also directed a television series (50 Ways to Kill your Lover, Discovery ID).
Graduation productions include: One Minute (RADA), Lion in the Streets (Rose Bruford), and Coming Home (ALRA).
Associate directing includes: The 39 Steps (West End; the UK touring production, 2010; and new productions in Israel, Italy and Australia) and Potted Potter.
Hanna contributed two chapters to Howard Barker’s Theatre by James Reynolds (Bloomsbury) is the only woman to have directed for the Wrestling School.