Cynthia Croot

Cynthia Croot is a director, deviser, writer, and social justice activist who serves as Associate Professor and Head of the MFA Performance Pedagogy program at the University of Pittsburgh. Croot earned her MFA in Directing from Columbia University under the tutelage of Anne Bogart, Robert Woodruff, Andrei Serban, and Kristin Linklater. U.S. directing credits include: John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves and Theresa Rebeck’s Seminar (Perseverance Theatre, Juneau); Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (Colorado Shakespeare Festival); Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing and the company-created chamber musical The Millay Sisters (Stonington Opera House) as well as productions in NYC at PS122, HERE, Town Hall, The Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, Symphony Space, Joe's Pub, and the Guggenheim Museum.

A 2007-2009 Fellow of the NEA/TCG Career Development Program for Directors, Croot was  Resident Director of the NYC-based theatre company Conni's Avant Garde Restaurant. With her company, she staged experimental audience-immersive and site-specific work in NYC, the Cleveland Public Theatre, OH; The Motherlodge Festival, Louisville, KY; North American Culture Lab, NY; and American Repertory Theatre’s "Club Oberon" in Cambridge, MA. Croot’s direction helped earn Conni's Avant Garde Restaurant two 2012 New York Innovative Theatre Awards. In 2015, she co-founded the activist art collective Ifyoureallyloveme with poet Joy Katz. Their first project: One Large, a participatory performance about race and money, was performed at the Open Engagement Conference, Pittsburgh, the Theatre Communications Group Conference, Washington, DC, and at Actors Theatre of Louisville, KY.

Among her international credits, Croot toured Suzan-Lori Park’s Venus in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa, during the historic moment of Sara Baartman's repatriation and burial. Her benefit U.S. stagings of VENUS at the Public Theater and Gatehouse (NYC) featured Tim Robbins, Joe Morton, Jayne Houdyshell, Arliss Howard and Kathleen Chalfant. In 2008 she received a TCG/ITI grant for travel to Croatia for another incarnation of the Venus Project: using it as a lens to examine the sex trafficking industry in Eastern Europe.

In 2017 she launched “Taking Refuge,” an examination of displaced people around the world by artists, activists, journalists, academics, and individuals directly affected by war and political violence. The project was a collaboration with Colgate University, the College of Charleston, College of the Holy Cross, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Louisiana State University, Noor Theatre company, Roehampton University UK, and Washington College, MD.

Her current research focuses on staging opera and music-centered pieces addressing human rights. These include: 

“Mirror Butterfly: the Migrant Liberation Movement Suite” by composer Benjamin Barson with libretto by Ruth Margraff; “Angelmakers” a song cycle about female serial killers by Molly Rice; and “Bad Activist” starring dissident Vietnamese musician Mai Khoi. A one-woman show exploring Khoi's journey from pop stardom to life in exile, it has toured internationally. 

Most recently, Croot directed “We Crossed the River," a chamber opera about migrant children interred along the US/Mexico border, composed by Eric Moe with libretto by Angie Cruz, at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, NYC.