About Jesse Berger - Artistic Director

As founding artistic director of Red Bull Theater, Jesse Berger has adapted and directed productions of Pericles, The Revenger’s Tragedy, Edward the Second, Women Beware Women and The Duchess of Malfi.  All five productions received critically-acclaimed extended Off Broadway runs.  Jesse’s adaptations of The Revenger’s Tragedy and Women Beware Women are published by Dramatists Play Service.  Red Bull Theater continues to produce an eclectic variety of classical and contemporary work under Jesse’s leadership, including the OBIE Award-Winning Revelation Reading Series. 

Jesse has also directed in New York and across the country at such theaters as Denver Center Theatre Company (Richard III) The Old Globe (Othello), Pittsburgh Public Theatre (The Laramie Project, I Am My Own Wife, Life X 3, A Number, Circle Mirror Transformation), New York Theater Workshop, SoHo Rep, Theaterworks, the Pearl, Urban Stages, Barrington Stage (Sleuth, Absurd Person Singular), Dorset Theatre, Lincoln Center Theater Director’s Lab, Theatre J, the Utah, Arizona, Hamptons, and St. Louis Shakespeare Festivals, the Asolo Theatre Company, Washington Shakespeare Company (Marat/Sade), among others, including directing Michael Learned in All's Well That Ends Well. Jesse has also helped develop new plays at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center and the Playwright’s Center, and he received a Helen Hayes Award for his direction of Marat/Sade.

Jesse was associate director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC for three seasons, working with Michael Kahn, JoAnne Akalaitis, Patrick Stewart, Kelly McGillis, Elizabeth Ashley and others on 20 productions, as well as staging King Lear and Merry Wives of Windsor for the Shakespeare Theatre Company at the 4,000-seat outdoor Carter Barron Amphitheater. Jesse assistant directed the revival of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man on Broadway, and was the 1999 US Directing Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, where he assisted Tim Carroll and Mark Rylance. Jesse began his professional career as an apprentice to Garland Wright at The Guthrie Theater and was his assistant director on four productions, including Old Times, Babes in Arms, and King Lear.

Jesse has taught and directed at the Juilliard School of Drama, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, the Shakespeare Theatre Academy for Classical Acting, University of Texas-Austin, the Guthrie Theater/University of Minnesota, Bard College, New School/Lang College, Virginia Commonwealth University, Michael Howard Studios, and the American Academy of Dramatic Art.

Jesse trained at Central College in London and Southern Utah University. A recipient of the NEA/TCG Directors grant and a nominee for the Alan Schneider Award, Jesse is also a member of Lincoln Center Theatre Director’s Lab, SDC, and New York Theatre Workshop’s Usual Suspects.