Jan's Profile

Artistic Director of the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival. Her first season with LTSF will be Summer 2008.

Jan Powell is a director, singer and actor with a principal focus in Shakespeare, music theatre, and original work. As the founding Artistic Director of Tygres Heart Shakespeare Company resident in the Portland Center for the Performing Arts, she produced and directed many Shakespeare productions, including the entire canon of history plays.

She is a past president of the Shakespeare Theatre Association of America.

Prior to her arrival at LTSF, her directing projects have included: Beggar’s Opera for Portland Baroque Orchestra; two David Schiff operas, Gimpel the Fool with Richard Zeller for Third Angle Music Ensemble, and various stagings of Vashti; L’Infedelta Delusa and La Finta Giardiniera for Chamber Opera Oregon; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet for the American Shakespeare Center in Virginia; As You Like It and Cloud Nine for the Mendocino Shakespeare Festival; The Comedy of Errors for San Francisco Shakespeare, The Twilight of the Golds for Boston’s Stoneham Theatre, doing the original adaptation and direction for the premiere production of Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthstories, and a number of other world premiere plays for various venues, including Money Shot; Rendezvous; Mrs. Shakespeare: The Complete Works; Citizens of the World; Tin Pan Alley; A Match Made in Madness; Touch the Skies; Wings of the Soul.

Jan has worked with many opera singers on theatrical interpretation, including Veronica Villoreal, Juliana Rambaldi, and Mi-Hae Park, in the studio of renowned American soprano and master voice teacher Ellen Faull.

She is also currently writing a dissertation on editing Shakespeare to support the actor’s creative process.

Joined: January 2008