Amanda Friou is a disabled director and multidisciplinary performance artist. She currently serves as 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.

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. On very rare occasions, you may also see her as a performer.

Amanda is a world builder at heart. Her early training in dance and music resulted in a belief that making theatre is more than making plays. 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. A childhood math whiz who spent her free time playing dress up, creating puppet shows, and her favorite: making up elaborate dances, it is perhaps no surprise that Amanda's work as a theatre maker largely involves solving complex problems with fantastical solutions. She delights in making invisible subjective experiences visible on stage.

Her work has been seen at HERE Arts Center, Lincoln Center, Second Stage, La Jolla Playhouse, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Center Theatre Group, The Guthrie Theatre, American Repertory Theatre, Sound Theatre, and numerous colleges and universities.

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.