Anna D. Shapiro in an American director and was born in 1967. She specialized in theatre directing and received an undergraduate degree from Columbia College in Chicago. She also went to Yale School of Drama. In 1996 she received a Princess Grace Award for her professional achievements. All her colleagues from Yale named her ‘the waitress who will one day run American theatre because she was bold, inventive, creative and the smartest person in the Yale program. She perceived the theatrical scene in Chicago as being full with psychological realism. Anna D. Shapiro was born in Evanston, Illinois.
In 2002, Anna D. Shapiro started a career as head of the Graduate Directing Program in Theatre at the Northwestern University. Her longest professional partnership and most successful was with Steppenwolf Theatre. Today, Anna D. Shapiro is an artistic associate at Steppenwolf Theatre.
Her theatrical portfolio as a director includes plays like ‘Until We Find Each Other’, ‘The Pain and the Itch’, ‘Three Days of Rain’, ‘The Ordinary Yearning of Miriam Buddwing’, and ‘The Infidel’. Other names include ‘Iron’ at Manhattan Theater Club and ‘A Fair Country’ at Huntington Theater Company, proving that she collaborated with other theater companies as well. This helped her a lot to expand her artistic horizon, paving the way for her biggest success. Anna D. Shapiro’s portfolio as a director includes 10 plays and one big Broadway success.
Her biggest success was directing ‘August: Osage Country’ by Tracy Letts. For this play she won the Jefferson Award for Best Director. Being such a success, the play was commissioned by Broadway. The Broadway cast was the same as the initial cast, with only two actors being replaced. After being played in Broadway, ‘August: Osage Country’ was named by famous and reputable Time Magazine as the Number 1 Theatrical Production of 2007.
Part of Shapiro’s successes was gaining sponsorship with a number of international business to create a win-win business partnership. Many of these sponsorship lay in the production of the show – lighting companies, handling companies, such as Mobile Scissor Tables, sound companies and fashion design houses who would create and customise the costumes.
The most notable and interesting partnership was with SE Commercial Services, a cleaning company based in Glasgow Scotland. The director hired this company to come on tour with the production team to clean the costumes and set before and after every single show around the world.