Kent Thompson
Artistic Director Kent Thompson leads the Rocky Mountain West’s flagship professional resident theatre with a renewed excitement and an invigorating challenge to climb to the summit and explore the future of American theatre in the pioneering spirit of the West. Since the Tony Award-winning company’s opening performance in 1979, Denver Center for the Performing Arts Founder Donald R. Seawell, Founding Artistic Director Edward Payson Call and long-time Artistic Director Donovan Marley nurtured a commitment to classics, the best of contemporary plays and the development of new works. In his first four seasons, Kent broadened artistic offerings to include more plays by women and Latinos.
Kent is in his fourth season as Artistic Director of the Denver Center Theatre Company. In his first four Denver seasons he directed productions of Dusty and the Big Bad World, Plainsong, Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, Amadeus, King Lear and Measure for Measure.
Prior to moving to Denver he was Producing Artistic Director of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival (ASF) for 16 years. For ASF, he directed the world premieres of Disguises, Aaronville Dawning, A Lesson Before Dying, Lizard and productions of Macbeth, Sheppey, Noises Off, Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear, A Man for All Seasons, Richard II, The Circle, Antony and Cleopatra, Oliver!, Othello, The Tempest, Hamlet, The Cherry Orchard, Peter Pan, Twelfth Night, Season’s Greetings and Big River among others. His production of Macbeth was selected by Dana Gioia, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), to tour to 13 military bases throughout the United States in the fall of 2004.
In 1991 Kent created the Southern Writers’ Project (SWP), a program designed to commission and develop new plays that presented 16 world premieres during his tenure, including plays by Craig Warner, James McLure, Kia Corthron, Romulus Linney, Keith Glover, Carlyle Brown, Barbara Lebow, Doris Baizley and Regina Taylor. Two of Kent’s major accomplishments since moving to Denver have been the establishment of the Women’s Voices Fund, endowing the commissioning and development of new plays by women at the Denver Center, and the Colorado New Play Summit, quickly becoming a premier national festival for new American Plays. He served for eight years on the Board of Directors for Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the national service organization for not-for-profit professional theatres, also serving as its president for three years. He has served on peer review panels for the NEA (also chair), TCG, The Pew Charitable Trusts, The Fulbright Scholars Program, The Wallace Funds, The Doris Duke Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
