Amanda Friou is a disabled director and multidisciplinary performance artist. She is an Associate Professor at Boston Conservatory at Berklee where she teaches acting, directing, devising, and musical theatre performance in both the MFA and BFA programs. Secretly, she is always teaching text analysis and composition.
As an artist and educator, she works nationally and internationally bridging the traditional world of musical theatre with that of experimental theatre and puppetry, with a special interest in object and visual theatre. In addition to directing, she designs and fabricates puppets and consults on projects aiming to straddle the divide between traditional theatre and puppetry. Her work as a theatre maker largely involves solving complex problems with fantastical solutions. On very rare occasions, you may also see her as a performer.
Amanda's incisive, highly theatrical work is driven by a desire to make invisible subjective experiences visible on stage. A world builder at heart, her early training in dance and music has resulted in a belief that making theatre is inherently multi-disciplinary. For her, "theatre" is an umbrella term that covers a collection of artistic tools that can be used to fashion performance in whatever form a story demands. Diverse stories require diverse forms.
Devoted to the evolution of the theatre and performance, Amanda is passionate about cultivating new work and shaping the next generation of artists. She believes that if you change who gets trained, you change the stories that get told. And stories? They change the narrative.
She has worked on pieces at HERE Arts Center, Geva Theater, Lincoln Center, Second Stage, La Jolla Playhouse, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Center Theatre Group, The Guthrie Theatre, American Repertory Theatre, Sound Theatre, and Fredericia Teatre in Frederecia, Denmark. In addition, she has served as a guest artist and consultant at NYU, The University of Iowa, The University of Florida, Dean College, and SUNY Brockport, among others.
Amanda is a member of SDC and AFT, an alumna of Macalester College, The University of Washington School of Drama, The O'Neill Theatre Center National Puppetry Conference, St. Ann’s Puppet Lab, and she was a two time fellow of the Drama League Director's Project. Most recently she was a resident artist at Chalk Hill on the Warnecke Ranch and Vineyard in Healdsburg, California.
