Bill Rauch

Director Bill Rauch’s work has been seen across the nation including on Broadway in the Tony Award-winning production All the Way. Mr. Rauch has been the Artistic Director of Oregon Shakespeare Festival since 2007, where he has directed multiple world premieres including Mother Road by Octavio Solis, Roe by Lisa Loomer, Alexa Junge’s Fingersmith, Off the Rails by Randy Reinholz, Robert Schenkkan’s All the Way, The Great Society, and By the Waters of Babylon, and Bill Cain’s Equivocation, as well as 20 other classical and new plays. Among his initiatives at OSF, Mr. Rauch committed to commissioning up to 37 new plays to dramatize moments of change in American history. “American Revolutions: the U.S. History Cycle” is now in its seventh year of production, and commissions that have gone on to productions on Broadway and at other regional theatres include Sweat by Lynn Nottage, Indecent by Paula Vogel, Roe by Lisa Loomer, American Night by Culture Clash, and Party People by Universes. Mr. Rauch is also cofounder of Cornerstone Theater Company, where he directed more than 40 productions in rural and urban communities nationwide and served as artistic director from 1986 to 2006. He has directed a number of world premieres, including Night is a Room at New York’s Signature Theatre, Body of an American at Portland Center Stage, The Clean House at Yale Repertory Theatre; Living Out and For Here or To Go? at the Mark Taper Forum; and My Wandering Boy and The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler at South Coast Repertory. He also directed the New York premiere of The Clean House at Lincoln Center Theater. Work elsewhere includes productions at South Coast Repertory, Guthrie Theater, Arena Stage, Seattle Repertory, Long Wharf Theatre, Pasadena Playhouse, Great Lakes Theater Festival and En Garde Arts. His production of The Pirates of Penzance (OSF, 2011) played during Portland Opera’s 14/15 season. Bill is the recipient of a 2015 Ford Fellowship, and the Independent Reviews of New England Award and Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Award nominations for Best Direction of All the Way; in 2012 he received the Fichandler Award, TCG’s Visionary Leadership Award in 2010, and the Margo Jones Medal in 2009. Other honors include a Falstaff Award (2013), United States Artists Prudential Fellow (2008), Los Angeles Weekly, DramaLogue, Garland, Connecticut Critics’ Circle, Helen Hayes and Ovation Awards, and he is the only artist to have won the inaugural “Leadership for a Changing World” award. He was a Claire Trevor Professor at the University of California Irvine, and has also taught at the University of Southern California and U.C.L.A. In the summer of 2019, Bill will become the inaugural artistic director of the Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center, being built at the World Trade Center in New York City.