ABOUT THE ARTIST
“Sabrina has a gift for gently coaxing stories from people of all ages and backgrounds and shaping them into theater, telling the stories that often get ignored. . . She is one of those rare people who possess the energy and enthusiasm to inspire and ignite—but also the deep respect for other points of view that facilitates productive collaboration. She is one of my longest-term and most cherished colleagues.”
—Bill Rauch, Artistic Director, Perelman Performing Arts Center; Former Artistic Director, Oregon Shakespeare Festival;
Co-Founder, Cornerstone Theater Company.
“Sabrina worked with Amy [Brenneman] as a writer to create a performance that was personal, humorous, and powerful. Mouth Wide Open was a thrilling example of Sabrina’s ability to use movement and dance to amplify emotional truth, reveal unspoken aspects of a character, and tell a story.”
—Diane Paulus, Artistic Director, American Repertory Theatre
“Sabrina Peck is an artist of infectious charm and rare intelligence. I have only known her to elevate the work of her collaborators by running with the best ideas, letting the bad ones fall of their own weight, and improving those in between. She is one of a handful of choreographers, in my experience, who have found consistently original and compelling modes of staging for music theatre.”
—James Bundy, Artistic Director, Yale Repertory Theatre;
Dean, Yale School of Drama
“Sabrina is that rare thing, a theater artist with her own vision, yet deeply attentive to the vision of others. I applaud her work.”
—Robert Brustein, Founding Artistic Director, American Repertory Theatre
Sabrina Peck conceives, directs and choreographs original theater works infused with movement and music. She often travels to diverse communities to collaborate with professionals and local residents on visually stunning productions that reflect the history and lifeblood of those people and places. Productions include common green/common ground, with community gardeners from Brooklyn, East Village, Harlem and Hunt's Point in the Bronx; Speaking our Streets, with former tobacco workers and residents of the West End in Durham, North Carolina; Commodities, with commodities pit traders on Wall Street; Odakle Ste with Bosnian Muslim refugees in Croatia; Waiting, with former refugees at Wave Hill Gardens in the Bronx; and To the River, with 40 children from Clinton Hill on a Hudson River Pier, commissioned by Dancing in the Streets.
As a director, Peck most often collaborates with living playwrights. She brings to the play development process a keen sense of narrative rhythm and shape; an instinct for telling a story with economy and originality; and a formidable command of lighting, sound, movement and other elements of heightened theatricality. Recently, Peck co-created and directed Overcome by Amy Brenneman, about her journey parenting a daughter with an intellectual disability, developed at The Yard and presented at the Cotuit Center for the Arts. Prior to that, The Brenneman-Peck collaboration was Mouth Wide Open at the American Repertory Theater. Recent staged readings include Julius Caesar at Classic Stage Company, translated from the Shakespeare by Shishir Kurup for the Play On! Festival and Kurup’s Merchant On Venice, an adaptation of the Shakespeare at Queens Theater in the Park. Peck directed Jessica Litwak’s My Heart is in the East at LaMama. She also directed The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek by Naomi Wallace at the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College. Peck and Playwright Chiori Miyagawa conceived and developed Antigone Project, a reimagining of the Sophocles by five contemporary women playwrights including Lynn Nottage, Karen Hartman and Caridad Svich. Peck directed the developmental readings of the pieces at The Public Theater, Second Stage, Classic Stage Company and The Vineyard Theater. The Women's Project presented the final production. Peck has also directed Dawn Saito's Blood Cherries at Dance Theater Workshop in NYC (with Jonathan Rosenberg); Stephanie Fleischmann's Blue Hyacinths for the Dawn Powell Festival in NYC; Lenora Champagne's Wants at the Ohio Theatre; and Amy Brenneman's Interstates at the So Grand Theater. At New Dramatists in NYC, she developed with Todd London The Trials of Monica Lewinsky, based on the verbatim Grand Jury Testimony (later presented at HBO's U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen). For New Dramatists she also served as resident director, staging a reading of Chimps, a new play by British playwright Simon Block, among other projects. Passionate about music, Peck has also directed staged readings of several original chamber operas, including composer Philip Johnston and Fleischmann's The Hotel Carter at Mabou Mines, and composer Miki Navazio and Fleischmann's Far Sea Pharisee at the Public Theater. She is a member of both the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society and the Lincoln Center Theater Director's Lab.
Choreography
Peck is equally at home staging large-scale music-theater as she is designing original movement for classic plays. In both cases, her choreography is inventive, dynamic, and always concerned with furthering the story or revealing the essence of a character. Most recently she choreographed Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. An interweaving of the two classic plays and the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, MMC was previously mounted at Yale Repertory Theater. She choreographed The Clean House at Lincoln Center Theater, written by Macarthur-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Other musicals include Eleanor: An American Love Story (Ford's Theatre, Washington, D.C.); Heart Land (Goodspeed Opera House at Chester); The Good Person of New Haven (Long Wharf Theater); Kudzu (Ford's Theatre); and A Community Carol (Arena Stage). Plays with movement include Henry VIII (New York Shakespeare Festival); Richard II and Richard III (Theater for a New Audience). Choreography for film/TV includes Anita Liberty for Bravo, and Everybody Over Here for Nickelodeon. Large-scale extravaganzas include Harvard's 350th Anniversary Stadium Spectacular.
For Cornerstone Theater Company, she has choreographed many inventive music-theater adaptations of classic plays, including The Videostore Owner's Significant Other, an adaptation of Lorca's The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wifein D.C. (recipient of a Helen Hayes award) and The Maske Family Musical. She has also choreographed many of Cornerstone's epic community collaborations, including The House on Walker River, an adaptation of the Oresteia on the Walker River Pauite Indian Reservation in Nevada; Too (2) Noble Brothers, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Two Noble Kinsmen with high school students on the Lower East Side (sponsored by the New York Shakespeare Festival); and The Winter's Tale: An Interstate Adventure, a nationally-touring adaptation of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale with 50 Americans ages 7-77 (the subject of the documentary Cornerstone on HBO Signature). Peck recently taught at the Cornerstone Institute, a training program for community-based theater artists.
Residencies and Teaching
Peck has been a visiting artist at Harvard University, Duke University, Columbia University and NYU Tisch School of the Arts Department of Drama, creating original productions in collaboration with students. At Duke, NYU, Brooklyn College and Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, she has taught courses in personal narrative through performance, or Community-Engaged Performance, educating college students about the history of community-engaged theater and bringing them into neighboring communities to create original theater in collaboration with local residents.
Peck has also been a guest teacher at Bard College (JoAnne Akalaitis’ Dangerous Theater class); Hunter College (Rebecca Connors’ English class on the literature of the body); and Lincoln Center Theater’s Education Program. She mentored playwriting students at Bard College, directing their plays for a festival. She has also coached acting students in movement and choreography at the Yale School of Drama (while choreographing Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella), the Juilliard School (while choreographing The Time of Your Life and Native Speech), and the American Repertory Theater Institute (while choreographing The lady from Maxim's).
She was a featured speaker at the 2024 Public Interested Conference at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and has been a panelist/presenter at: the Annual conference for the Association for Theater in Higher Education (ATHE): “Site-Specific Theater and the Transformation of Memory”; the NYC Arts in Education Face to Face conference; the IDEA festival at Dwight Englewood School; The Stage Directors and Choreographer’s Society symposium, Directing a New American Theater; and the Theater without Borders’ symposium, The Future of International Exchange.
CityStep
Peck is the Founder of CityStep, a social impact nonprofit based at several colleges that is a force for positive change in the lives of young people. Currently at Harvard, Penn, Princeton, Yale and Columbia,, CityStep brings college students into city schools to teach creative self-expression and mutual understanding through dance. She is currently Executive Director of CityStep.org, formed to aid the expansion of CityStep to more colleges and communities nationwide.
Education
Peck has an M.F.A. in directing from Brooklyn College. She received her B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard University, where she received a David McCord Prize for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts. She has a Movement Specialist Certificate from the New School and studied extensively at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies. Her early training includes classical piano, ballet and Graham technique, and a year as Twyla Tharp's assistant.