Origin

The College of Fellows of the American Theatre is an honorary society of outstanding theatre educators and professional theatre practitioners. The organization was formed in 1965 as a project proposed by members of the American Theatre Association. The College is now an independent not-for-profit organization.

Activities

Membership in the college is conferred on individuals of acknowledged national stature who have distinguished themselves during careers of notable dedication, exceptional service and outstanding achievement. Fewer than ten new Fellows are created each year, but almost 200 persons have been so honored to date. The majority are still living and most are still active in the theatre to some degree.

The College meets each year at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is a performing arts center located on the Potomac River, adjacent to the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C...

 in Washington, D.C. in conjunction with the Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival. Festival participants are invited to the College of Fellows Annual Lecture, which honors Roger L. Stevens, founder and first Chairman of the Center. Each year one of the Fellows is selected to give a lecture on the topic of his or her choice. On the eve of the meeting day, Fellows and their guests honor the new class of Fellows-Elect at the College's Annual Dinner.

The college bestows its public recognition and honors in order to encourage and promote excellence in research and creativity in both the educational and the professional theatre. Among the Fellows are actors, theatre critics, costume designers, directors, scene designers, playwrights, lighting designers, producers and administrators, research scholars, and teachers, any of whom may be associated with the commercial as well as the educational theatre in America.

Each year at the annual meeting, and in individual sessions elsewhere during the year, distinguished members of the organization are interviewed on video tape in order to preserve the history of American theatre with which they have been involved. A history of the Fellows was published in 1995: American Theatre Fellows: the First Thirty Years, edited by Jed H. Davis and an advisory board consisting of the dean and deans emeriti of the College. The interview video tapes and other archival materials of the Fellows are preserved at the University of Texas Libraries, Austin, Texas.

Among those upon on whom membership has been conferred are Edward Albee

Edward Albee

Edward Franklin Albee III is an American playwright who is best known for The Zoo Story , The Sandbox , Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , and a rewrite of the screenplay for the unsuccessful musical version of Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's . His works are considered well-crafted, often...

, Joseph Anthony

Joseph Anthony

Joseph Anthony was an American playwright, actor, and director. He made his film acting debut in the 1934 film Hat, Coat, and Glove and his theatrical acting debut in a 1935 production of Mary of Scotland...

, Avery Brooks

Avery Brooks

Avery Franklin Brooks is an American actor, television director, jazz musician, opera singer and college professor. Brooks is perhaps best known for his television roles as Benjamin Sisko on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and as Hawk on Spenser: For Hire and its spinoff A Man Called Hawk, and in the...

, Jack Clay

Jack Clay

Jack DeWayne Clay is an American acting teacher, director and actor.A graduate of the Northwestern University school of speech under Alvina Krause, Clay taught at Oberlin College , the University of Miami , and the University of South Florida...

, Richard L. Coe

Richard L. Coe

Richard Livingston Coe , born in New York City, was a theatre and cinema critic for The Washington Post for more than fifty years. Coe was renowned for the astute advice he gave to many pre-Broadway try-out companies...

, Moses Gunn, Richard G. Fallon

Richard G. Fallon

Richard G. Fallon is Dean Emeritus of The School of Theatre at Florida State University.He came to Tallahassee in 1956 and has been active in theatre community ever since. Dr. Fallon is a Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor, a recipient of the Florida Governor's Award for the Arts, the...

, Zelda Fichandler

Zelda Fichandler

Zelda Fichandler is an American stage producer, director, and educator, best known as cofounder and longtime artistic director of the Arena Stage theatre in Washington, D.C....

, Gerald Freedman

Gerald Freedman

Gerald Freedman is an American theatre director, librettist, and lyricist, and a college dean.Born in Lorain, Ohio, Freedman was educated at Northwestern University, where he received both BA and MA degrees. He began his career as assistant director of such projects as Bells Are Ringing, West Side...

, Rev. Gilbert V. Hartke, O.P., Julia Heflin

Julia Heflin

Julia Dorn Heflin was a journalist, a theatre producer and a teacher. The Washington Post aptly called her "a firebrand." In the 1930's, with an English-speaking cast, she staged an incendiary production of the Clifford Odets play Waiting For Lefty on a truck-bed in a Moscow street -- where...

, Fay Kanin

Fay Kanin

Fay Kanin is an American screenwriter, playwright and producer. Kanin was President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1979 to 1983.-Biography:...

, Jerome Lawrence

Jerome Lawrence

Jerome Lawrence was an American playwright and author.-Life and career:Lawrence was born Jerome Lawrence Schwartz in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Sarah , a poet, and Samuel Schwartz, a printer. He worked for several small newspapers as a reporter/editor before moving into radio as a writer for CBS....

, Ming Cho Lee

Ming Cho Lee

Ming Cho Lee is a Chinese-born American theatrical set designer and a longtime professor at the Yale School of Drama....

, Romulus Linney

Romulus Linney (playwright)

Romulus Zachariah Linney IV was an American playwright and professor.-Life and career:Linney was born in Philadelphia, the son of Maitland Clabaugh and Romulus Zachariah Linney III. His great-grandfather was Republican Congressman Romulus Zachariah Linney. Linney was raised in Boone, North...

, Margaret E. Lynn

Margaret E. Lynn

Margaret E. Lynn formalized U.S. Army entertainment, beginning in Korea in the 1950s. Building on the tradition of Civil War camp shows, and a military show Yip Yip Yaphank created by Irving Berlin as a soldier in World War I, she eventually developed the U.S...

, Davey Marlin-Jones

Davey Marlin-Jones

Davey Marlin-Jones was an American stage director, as well as a local television personality. He was born in Winchester, Indiana, and was known as a tireless advocate for the local stage and theatrical scene in the many places he lived during his long career.From 1970 to 1987, he was a film and...

, Marshall W. Mason

Marshall W. Mason

Marshall W. Mason is an American theater director, the founder and for eighteen years, artistic director of the Circle Repertory Company in New York City....

, Mark Medoff

Mark Medoff

Mark Medoff is an American playwright, screenwriter, film and theatre director, actor, and professor. His play Children of a Lesser God received both the Tony Award and the Olivier Award...

, Arnold Moss

Arnold Moss

Arnold Moss was an American character actor.His son is songwriter Jeff Moss....

, Donn B. Murphy

Donn B. Murphy

Donn B. Murphy taught theatre and speech courses at Georgetown University from 1954 to 2000. At the invitation of Jacqueline Kennedy and Letitia Baldrige, he became a theatrical advisor to the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson Administrations for White House dramatic and music presentations in...

, Frederick O'Neal

Frederick O'Neal

Frederick O'Neal was an American actor, theater producer and television director. He founded the American Negro Theater and was the first African-American president of the Actors' Equity Association...

, Craig Noel

Craig Noel

Craig Noel was an American theatre producer. He was the founding director of the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, California and led it for more than 60 years...

, Jose Quintero

José Quintero

José Benjamin Quintero was a Panamanian theatre director, producer and pedagogue best known for his interpretations of the works of Eugene O'Neill.-Early years:...

, Lloyd Richards

Lloyd Richards

Lloyd George Richards was a Canadian-American theatre director, actor, and dean of the Yale School of Drama from 1979 to 1991, and Yale University professor emeritus.- Biography :...

, George Schaefer

George Schaefer (director)

George Louis Schaefer was a director of television and Broadway theatre from the 1950s to the 1990s.-Life and career:...

, Barrie Stavis

Barrie Stavis

Barrie Stavis was a distinguished American playwright. He has authored several powerful plays about men struggling in the vortex of history. They advocate ideas, suffer, often are executed, but eventually their ideas win. The heresy of one age becomes the established truth of the next...

, Ezra Stone

Ezra Stone

Ezra Stone was an American actor and director who had a long career on the stage, in films, radio, and television, mostly as a director...

, Jennifer Tipton

Jennifer Tipton

Jennifer Tipton is a lighting designer. She has designed for dance, theater and opera.In 1958, she graduated from Cornell University...

 and Winifred Mary Ward

Winifred Mary Ward

Winifred Mary Ward She was one of the founders of modern creative drama.Ward was born in Eldora, Iowa on October 29, 1884. She never married, She completed a Ph.D. in Education at the University of Chicago and immediately went on to teach at Northwestern University in the School of Oratory as a...

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