ANDRÉ

André Gregory has been one of the most important forces in the American theatre for nearly forty years. Gregory was one of the original creators of the regional theatre movement, the off-Broadway movement in New York, and with his partner Wallace Shawn, the American independent film movement.

He headed the Inner-City Cultural Center, a theatre in Watts founded right after the Watts riots to bring theatre to underprivileged teenagers. He was co-creator of the Seattle Repertory Theatre and Artistic Director of the Philadelphia Theatre of the Living Arts, where his productions included Galileo, Poor Bitos, Beclch, and Endgame.

His production of The Blacks ran for years in New York and featured now legendary performers James Earl Jones, Cicely Tyson, Lou Gossett and Maya Angelou. His production of Alice in Wonderland played for seven years, as well as touring the U.S., Europe, and the Mideast, and was made into a book in collaboration with photographer Richard Avedon.

His forty-year collaboration with Wallace Shawn began with his critically acclaimed production of Shawn's Our Late Night, at Joseph Papp's Public Theater. Shawn and Gregory went on to create My Dinner With André, directed by Louis Malle. The partnership of Shawn, Malle and Gregory later created Vanya on 42nd Street. In 1999, Gregory directed Shawn's play, The Designated Mourner, in an abandoned men's club in Lower Manhattan. His most recent production of Endgame — over the years he's done three – was performed in an unfinished Donald Judd building in the middle of the Marfa Texas desert in 2005. In 2009 he directed Grasses of a Thousand Colors, also by Shawn, at the Royal Court Theatre in London, and in 2011 directed Shawn's adaptation of Ibsen's Master Builder Solness, which was made into a film by Jonathan Demme, currently in production.

As an actor, Gregory has performed in a dozen films, including The Last Temptation of Christ by Martin Scorsese, Mosquito Coast by Peter Weir and Celebrity by Woody Allen. He wrote a play called Bone Songs that he performed at Redcat in Los Angeles and at the 92nd Street Y in New York in 2006. For the last five years he has been studying drawing, and it has become a new passion.