Elise Thoron

Co-Founder and Artistic Director

Elise is a playwright, adaptor, and an acclaimed director, whose plays have been produced in the United States, Europe, Japan, Russia, and Cuba. Her ongoing collaboration with Japanese paper artist Kyoko Ibe Recycling: washi tales is the subject of documentary and articles. For 20 years, she created cross-cultural exchanges with Russian and American theater artists, adapting and directing The Great Gatsby at The Pushkin Theater in Moscow - where it played for over nine years - and her translations of Russian plays have been produced and published in the United States and Canada. As Associate Artistic Director at American Place Theatre, she worked closely with Wynn Handman, developing new plays, solo shows, and educational programming which led to Literature to Life. She has adapted Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, Lowry’s The Giver, and developed County of Kings with Tony award–winning poet Lemon Andersen, which went on to the Public Theater and venues around the world.  She also developed and directed Andersen’s play Toast with the Sundance Theater program and Public Theater. Her Afro-Cuban-Yiddish opera Hatuey: Memory of Fire, with composer Frank London, had its inaugural production in Havana at Opera de la Calle, and North American Premiere at Peak Performances. She is developing Felon: A Play, a solo performance with formerly incarcerated lawyer-poet Dwayne Betts and his Million Book Project, bringing books and authors into prisons across the country. Elise was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival: Play On! to “translate” Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice into contemporary English soon to be published.