Joanie Schultz 

"I believe that theater can change people’s consciousness.  By that, I mean that theater can remind people that they have choices in their daily lives, and can challenge those choices.  I hope that people leave my productions with questions that stick with them.  I hope that they think about the way their actions affect the world around them.  To me, the magic of theater happens in transformation.  A character’s personal transformation, an object becoming something else, or the movement of scenery are all theatrical devises that can create awe in an audience, and expand the mind’s understanding of possibility.  This is something unique to theater because the magic of change happens before their very eyes.  By witnessing live transformation, an audience is revived to the possibility of transformation in their own lives.  Change is something people seldom believe is possible anymore, both in themselves and the world around them.  I hope that the ritual of theater can encourage and enliven people to a belief in their own power in the world around and within them. 

Because of this belief, the work I pursue resides in a genre I call mythic realism.  A world based in a reality that is recognizable to us in some way that we can hang on to, but with events that transcend what we believe to be the limitations of this world."

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Joanie Schultz is a freelance theater and opera director based out of Chicago, Illinois.  

Joanie is originally from Aspen, Colorado, and moved to Chicago in 1996 to pursue a B.A. at Columbia College, where she graduated in 2000 with a concentration in Theater Directing.  In 2007, she received her M.F.A. in Theater Directing from Northwestern University. 

Between undergraduate and graduate schools Joanie founded Flush Puppy Productions, a not-for-profit company dedicated to artists collaborating across media, focusing primarily on integration of different art media with performance.  She served as Artistic Director for Flush Puppy for three years, in which she directed and oversaw several world premiere plays, gallery installations, original film, music, performance art, and interactive media projects.  During this time, Joanie also worked as the office manager and assistant to the artistic director of Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where she was given the opportunity to assistant direct several plays and direct a play for the Steppenwolf Ensemble Training Program

Since finishing graduate school, Joanie has been freelance directing, assistant directing, and teaching in Chicago and beyond.  In the fall of 2007 she was awarded a directing fellowship with the Drama League in New York, directed her off-Broadway debut, the world premiere of Autophagy by Sean Graney at the Abington Theatre.  She also had the honor of going as an observer to watch the creation of Robert Lepage's latest work with his company, Ex Machina, in Quebec City in October 2006.  In the summer of 2008 Joanie participated in the Lincoln Center Director's Lab.  Joanie is a company member with The Building Stage .

Joanie likes Bjork, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gregory Crewdson, Frederico Fellini, Regina Spektor, Tim Walker, Joseph Cornell, Haruki Murakami, and Michele Gondry, among other artists.  

She believes in magic.  She especially believes in magic onstage, and strives in her work to find the magic, miraculous, and mythological in the everyday.

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