About
Eric Colleary is a PhD student in the Theatre Historiography program at the University of Minnesota, where he received his Master of Arts degree in May of 2009. He is a director, sound designer and educator and scholar in theatre and performance.
In December, 2005 Eric Colleary received a Bachelor of Arts with Research Distinction in Theatre, Magna Cum Laude, from The Ohio State University with a minor in English literature. As an honors student, he completed a three-year research project on theatre for social change that culminated in a full thesis and was defended in front of a faculty committee. Performance topics in this research ranged from an all-male production of George Orwell's 1984, which dealt with issues of sexual inequality and government manipulation, to an original promenade play that investigated audience perceptions of morality in America using the Inferno by Dante Alighieri as a loose structure for the production.
Professionally, in the past five years alone, he has directed or assisted in the direction of over fifteen productions that have been performed both nationally and internationally. In 2006, he was the assistant to Daniel MacIvor for the world premiere of his critically acclaimed play A Beautiful View which toured across the United States and Canada and was included in the anthology I Still Love You (winner of the 2006 Governor General's Award for Drama). In 2005, he was the assistant director for a major production of A Midsummer Night's Dream under director Lesley Ferris with the Virginia Arts Festival in Norfolk, VA and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in up-state New York. Both productions were fully-staged and included the incidental music by Felix Mendelssohn, under the direction of Maestro JoAnn Falletta. Along with his diverse directing background that covers new works to classics, Colleary has also studied Anne Bogart's Composition, Viewpoints and Suzuki training with the SITI Company and is also proficient in the exploratory theatre techniques of Augusto Boal.
He currently lives in Minneapolis and is a graduate teaching assistant in the Department of Theatre Arts & Dance at the University of Minnesota where he has taught introductory theatre(2006) and dance courses(2007-2008), as well as dance (2007) and theatre history (2008-2009). As a post-modern generalist, his research covers a variety of topics. His masters thesis focused on the use of Holocaust imagery within the gay community in the United States during the 1970s, with particular attention to Martin Sherman's play Bent. He continues to freelance as a director, sound designer and workshop instructor.