Rachel Dickstein

stage director and designer

Rachel Dickstein (stage director and designer) is thrilled to be a part of the Sanctuary company. She is a director, writer, and choreographer of opera, theater, new music, and dance-based performance. Dickstein founded the Obie-winning theater company Ripe Time in 2000 to develop and produce ensemble-based, embodied adaptations from literature and documentary-based theater about women+ lives. Recent work includes Compass (ASU Gammage), Haruki Murakami’s Sleep (BAM Next Wave Festival), The World is Round (BAM-Fisher), and Septimus and Clarissa (Drama Desk, Drama League nominations, BPAC). Dickstein also directs new plays, chamber opera, and new music-theater works including Blood Moon (BMP Prototype), Thumbprint (LA Opera/Prototype), and the upcoming Star Singer (LA Opera, BMP/Prototype). Other upcoming projects include In[Finite] Time, Salvaged Pages (as writer), and Womenwaterrising. Dickstein is Associate Professor and Co-Chair of Theater and Performance at Purchase College, SUNY and the author of Towards Embodied Performance: Directing and the Art of Composition (Routledge 2024).