text: Graham Schmidt is a Brooklyn-based theater director, dramaturg, and teacher who believes in the transformative power of ritual, that performance can help us negotiate and battle for a more just society, and that theater saves lives. Graham directs plays--new and old--with and for underserved communities and his work imagines and endeavors to bring about a liberated society, one production at a time.
  Graham has directed and developed work at institutions including Aye Defy, Dorset Theater Festival, the Lark Theatre, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Egg and Spoon Theatre Collective, the Off Center, Salvage Vanguard Theater, the Wild Project, the National Winter Playwrights’ Retreat, the Blue Theater, NYU-Tisch, and UT-Austin.
  ​
  From 2007 – 2015, Graham served as resident director of the company he founded, Breaking String Theater Co. (Austin, TX). Graham’s work with Breaking String included re-imaginings of canonical plays (The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, Ghosts), international collaborations (Dulcey and Roxy at City Hall), contemporary and brand new American plays (The Beyoncé by Eliza Bent, Three, or the Sound of the Great Existential Nothingness by Timothy Braun, The How And The Why, by Sarah Treem), and annual new plays festivals that he produced from 2011 - 2013.
  Graham serves as the New Play Development Coordinator for Egg & Spoon Theatre Collective and Associate Director of Chay Yew’s Cambodian Rock Band. He teaches acting in the BFA Acting program at Brooklyn College, and lives in Brooklyn with his impossibly delightful staffy-lab mix, Scout.