Contact:	Kim Brockway					For immediate release
		(212) 854-2419
		kkb18@columbia.edu



Stage Director Robert Woodruff Joins 
Columbia University's School of the Arts


	Robert Woodruff, whose numerous directing credits include productions 
with The Flying Karamazov Brothers at Lincoln Center Theatre and Arena Stage 
and premieres of works by Sam Shepard at the New York Shakespeare Festival, 
has joined the Theatre Arts Division of Columbia University's School of the Arts.  
He is teaching directing and acting.
	"Robert Woodruff is an excellent addition to the faculty of accomplished 
theatre artists in the Theatre Arts Division," said Arnold Aronson, chair of the 
division.  "Our graduate students are fortunate to have the opportunity to study 
with someone who has directed so many major productions at renowned theaters 
around the country."
	Woodruff has directed several productions at The Mark Taper Forum, 
including In the Belly of the Beast, and Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind, A 
Madrigal Opera  and Struck Dumb.  His staging of Shakespeare's Comedy of 
Errors  with The Flying Karamazov Brothers at Lincoln Center Theatre was later 
broadcast by PBS.  He directed the premieres of Sam Shepard's Curse of the 
Starving Class, Buried Child  and True West  at The New York Shakespeare 
Festival, along with other pieces at such esteemed institutions as the Brooklyn 
Academy of Music, The Goodman Theatre in Chicago, La Jolla Playhouse, The 
American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, and the Alliance Theatre in 
Atlanta.
	Co-founder of The Eureka Theatre in San Francisco, Woodruff created The 
Bay Area Playwrights Festival, a forum for new play development.  He has been 
an associate artist of The Mark Taper Forum, and an artist-in-residence at The 
New York Shakespeare Festival and the New York Theatre Workshop.  He has 
received grants from the Pew Charitable Trust Foundation and the National 
Endowment for the Arts, and has been honored by the Los Angeles Drama 
Critics, the San Diego Theatre Critics, The Bay Area Critics Circle and New 
York's Soho News.
	Woodruff has taught at the University of California, San Diego; the 
University of California, Santa Barbara; New York University's Tisch School of 
the Arts; the Banff Center, Alberta, Canada; the Saratoga International Theatre 
Institute, and as an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia.  He holds a masters 
degree in theatre arts from San Francisco State University and graduated Phi 
Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude from SUNY Buffalo with a B.A. in political 
science.


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