“I make theatre because I believe in our capacity to connect and create, and because collaborative art-making remains one of the most powerful ways I know to sustain hope. I’m often drawn to projects where lived testimony takes theatrical form. I strive to make difficult histories legible without surrendering the possibility of epiphany and joy.
My work moves between contemporary and classic texts, music-driven events, and immersive ensemble pieces that unfold in conversation with landscapes, communities and cultures. I’m especially interested in theatre that is ambitious in form and generous in spirit — reaching beyond the proscenium into civic and public space.”
BIO
Cynthia Croot is a director, deviser, and educator working across theatre, opera, site-specific performance, and sound-based media. Her work investigates how the body holds history, creating performances that transform personal testimony, political trauma, and collective memory into shared experience. Drawing on music, research, and cross-disciplinary collaboration, her projects seek theatrical forms capable of holding difficult histories while preserving the possibility of renewal.
Croot’s work frequently crosses borders—geographic, aesthetic, and cultural—bringing artists, musicians, activists, and communities into shared creation. Recent projects include Bad Activist with Vietnamese dissident musician Mai Khoi; We Crossed the River, a chamber opera about migrant children detained along the U.S.-Mexico border (composer Eric Moe, librettist Angie Cruz); RECOIL, a devised exploration of American gun culture presented at the Smithsonian’s ACCelerate Festival; Mirror Butterfly: The Migrant Liberation Movement Suite, an activist jazz-opera (composer Benjamin Barson, librettist Ruth Margraff); and Angelmakers, a music-driven work by Molly Rice examining the violence and mythos of female serial killers.
Croot served as Resident Director of the experimental ensemble Conni’s Avant Garde Restaurant, where she helped develop immersive and site-specific performances presented in New York, Cleveland Public Theatre, and American Repertory Theatre’s Club Oberon. Her international credits include directing Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus in Cape Town and Johannesburg during the historic repatriation of Saartjie Baartman’s remains. Her productions have appeared at venues internationally and in the US including the Kennedy Center, Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater, the Guggenheim Museum, HERE Arts Center, and PS122.
A graduate of Columbia University’s MFA Directing program, where she studied with Anne Bogart, Robert Woodruff, Andrei Șerban, and Kristin Linklater, Croot is a former Fellow of the NEA/TCG Career Development Program for Directors. She currently serves as Associate Professor and Head of the MFA Performance Pedagogy program at the University of Pittsburgh, where her teaching and artistic practice explore how rehearsal rooms and performances can function as civic spaces—places where recognition, repair, and imagination coexist.