ABOUT CLAIRE:

 

I’ve had a passion for storytelling and creativity since childhood. I made my stage debut in a Chicago Park District summer camp play as the grandmother in Little Red Riding Hood and was yet again typecast as an elderly widow in my 7th grade production of Fiddler on the Roof. When I got to high school, I joined stage crew, where I discovered costume design. I designed or stage managed every play at our high school, and then produced a student-led production of Paula Vogel’s Indecent with other students. We turned our classroom into a theater, and I built a structure out of PVC pipes that would make it rain on stage.

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I entered Yale intending to study global affairs, but continued to pursue my passion for theater outside of classes. Although I had no experience with directing, I was selected by the Dramat, Yale’s largest undergraduate theater organization, to direct the Froshow, a play entirely run by first-year students. I realized that directing combined all of the things I love: literary analysis, innovative thinking, working as a team, and sharing stories. Directing became my passion – I ended up directing eight productions at Yale. I became a Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies major and recently finished my senior project in directing, a production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Part One: Millennium Approaches. Last summer, I received a grant to travel to France for my senior essay in Humanities, watching and writing about the work of women directors pushing the boundaries of performance and feminism at the prestigious Festival d’Avignon.

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Theater brings me energy, connection, and joy, and I want to share that with others. I want to pursue a career as a stage director, exploring issues of gender, sexuality, and what it means to define ourselves through our relationships with others.