Oskar Eustis
Full visit: October 30-November 2, 2024

• Artistic Director, The Public Theater
• Arts Professor, New York University, Tisch School of the Arts
• Founding Advisory Board Member, Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity, Cornell University
• ADW-PAL term: 2020-26
• Subject Area: Arts
• Faculty host: David Feldshuh (Professor, Dept. of Performing and Media Arts)
• Faculty co-host: Bruce Levitt (Professor, Dept. of Performing and Media Arts)

Oskar Eustis is the Artistic Director of The Public Theater and has worked as a director, dramaturg, and artistic director for theaters around the country. In recent years, Eustis has produced two Tony Award-winning productions in the category of best musical (Fun Home and Hamilton), as well as two productions that won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (Hamilton and Sweat).

Prior to his role at The Public, Eustis enjoyed a storied career that began at the Eureka Theatre Company in San Francisco (1986–89), where he commissioned Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, and directed its world première at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. At The Public, Eustis directed the New York premieres of Rinne Groff’s Compulsion and The Ruby Sunrise; Larry Wright’s The Human Scale; Julius Caesar; Public Works Twelfth Night at Shakespeare in the Park; and Suzan-Lori Parks’ White Noise.

Additionally, he has founded numerous groundbreaking programs at The Public, including Public Works, Public Forum, the Emerging Writers Group, and the Mobile Unit. Over the course of his career, Eustis has directed the world premieres of plays by Philip Kan Gotanda, David Henry Hwang, Emily Mann, Parks, Ellen McLaughlin, and Eduardo Machado, among many others.

He was the Artistic Director of The Redwing Theater Company in New York from 1976-1980, as well as the Artistic Director of Das Labor, the laboratory theater of the Schauspielhaus Zurich in Switzerland from 1978-80. From 1981 through 1986 he was resident director and dramaturg at the Eureka Theatre Company in San Francisco, and Artistic Director until 1989, when he moved to the L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum as Associate Artistic Director until 1994. Eustis then served as Artistic Director at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island for eleven years, during which time he was the founder and Chair of the Brown/Trinity consortium for Theater Training. In 2005 he took the helm at New York’s Public Theater.

Eustis was appointed as an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University in 2020 and is a founding advisory board member for Cornell’s Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity. He has taught at UCLA, Brown University, and NYU, and holds honorary doctorates from Brown University and Rhode Island College.He has taught at UCLA, Brown University, and NYU, and holds honorary doctorates from Brown University and Rhode Island College.