Bio / Teaching

Guy Zimmerman, PhD. I'm a writer, director, and producer of theatre. Since 2001 I've served as artistic director of the new works theatre company, Padua Playwrights, in Los Angeles. I recently completed a doctoral degree in Performance Studies and Theatre Studies in the joint UC Irvine/UC San Diego program. I've published articles and essays about film, theater, art, science and politics in Theatre Journal, SubStance, Shakespeare Bulletin, La Deleuziana, Modern Drama, The Harold Pinter Review, the critical anthology, Architecture in the Anthropocene (Open Humanities, 2013), TheaterForumLA Weekly, LA Theater Magazine, the LA Citizen, Cyrano’s Journal, and the arts and culture website Times Quotidian. Since 2001 I've staged over forty productions of new plays, moving several to stages in Atlanta, New York City, Edinburgh, Prague, and Berlin, and my productions have been fortunate enough to win many LA Weekly, Ovation, Garland, and Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle awards and nominations. My recent LA theater credits include: The Royal at the Met Theatre, the critically acclaimed The Fool and the Red Queen at the Lounge Theater in Hollywood, my own play The Black Glass, seen at Push-Push Theater in Atlanta and at Balhaus OST Theater in Berlin, Fractalicious! by playwright and critical theorist Bryan Reynolds, developed by Transversal Theater Company, at the Interferences Festival in Cluj, Romania, and The Hive Project, featured at the SLSA conference at Notre Dame in 2013. Over the years, I've also edited an eight-volume anthology series for Padua Press, distributed nationally by TCG, and produced and directed a series of digital media productions of original plays, including Pronghorn, Girl on a Bed, Gary’s Walk, Great Things, Hello, Say and Allen's Love. My own plays include La Clarita, The Inside Job, Vagrant, The Black Glass, The Hillary Game, and The Royal. In 2015, I  co-produced VisionLA Climate Action Arts Festival, staging over 80 environmentally-themed events at venues across the LA basin in support of the UN Ministers gathering in Paris for COP21. In 2023 I wrote and directed a feature-length documentary film, The Coyote Cycle, narrated by Ed Harris.