Michael French
Michael French
Artist Development, Coaching, & Facilitation
is originally from London, England. As a boy he saw the play “Cathy Come Home” by Jeremy Sandford on the seminal British television series Play for Today and was transformed. Thirteen years later he formed the Glasshouse Theatre Company where he wrote and directed the Ovation award wining play “The Rainy Season” and the much-acclaimed “Bellyache”. He stayed in England writing and directing until his father died and left him a medium sized pot of gold with which to see the world. After fourteen months riding bison in Alaska, he traveled to New York City to study the Meisner technique at the Acting Studio. It took him only three weeks to realize that he had made a terrible mistake; directing was his only love. Nestled under the wing of esteemed director Marjorie Ballentine, Mr. French stayed in New York City for the following ten years and directed over thirty-five productions in every space imaginable. Including, world premiers of “The Inner Workings of a Man” for Eva Minemar, “And On” for multi-award wining playwright Franco Alessandro, and two of his own plays, “There’s Something Cruel,” and “Alaska”.
In 2003 Mr. French relocated to Boulder, Colorado where he co-founded the influential theatre company Theatre13 and collaborated with Tiger Lion Arts on “The Buddha Prince,” a walking play about the life of the Dalai Lama. “The Buddha Prince” has since toured the U.S. extensively and was performed in Central Park in New York City during the summers of 2005 and 2008. More recently he was selected as one of only twenty-five directors to participate in Lincoln Center’s prestigious Director’s Lab program, and one of only eight directors to the Great Plains Theatre Conference.
Mr. French lives in Oakland, California as a resident director for PlayGround, an associate artist for the Oakland Theatre Project, the Director of Artist Development for Afro Urban Society’s “Onye Ozi” program, and the Co-Creative Director for Other Hand Media. He is presently writing “Betrayal in Haiti” with Raymond Barglow, a stage adaptation of the Heinrich Von Kleist novella “ The Betrothal of Santo Domingo” for production in 2022, and writing his first collection of short stories entitled “Babble.”
