Gideon Lester is Artistic Director and Chief Executive of the Fisher Center at Bard, and Senior Curator at the Center for Human Rights and the Arts. A Tony and Olivier award-winning creativeÂ
Recent projects include the world premiere of Justin Peck and Sufjan Stevens’s Illinoise; an international festival on the subject of Evidence; Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma! (Tony Award; Olivier Award); Pam Tanowitz’s Four Quartets, Song of Songs, and Pastoral; Ronald K. Brown and Meshell Ndegeocello’s Grace and Mercy; and Peter Sellars’ film This body is so impermanent…
Productions he has developed and commissioned have toured to theaters and art centers around the world, including BAM (Brooklyn); Circle in the Square (Broadway); CAP-UCLA (Los Angeles); the Kennedy Center; St Ann’s Warehouse (Brooklyn); New York City Center; Barbican (London); Walker Art Center (Minneapolis); Spielart (Munich); Onassis Cultural Center (Athens); Edinburgh International Festival, and many others.
He was previously co-curator of Crossing the Line Festival, and Acting Artistic Director and Dramaturg at the American Repertory Theatre. A tenured professor at Bard College, he was director of Bard’s undergraduate Theater & Performance Program from 2012–2020, and has previously held faculty positions at Harvard and Columbia, where he founded and directed an interdisciplinary arts collaboration lab at the Graduate School of the Arts.
As a writer for the stage, his translations include Molière’s Dom Juan; The Island of Slaves and The Dispute by Marivaux, Büchner’s Woyzeck, and Brecht’s Mother Courage, and his adaptations include Kafka’s Amerika, Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, and the libretto for Courtney Bryan’s opera setting of Tennessee Wlliams’ Suddenly Last Summer.
Lester has a B.A./M.A. from Brasenose College, Oxford. He was a Fulbright and Frank Knox Scholar at Harvard’s Institute for Advanced Theater Training. He is on the advisory board of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
