Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company announces the appointment of celebrated director and established arts leader, Mina Morita, as its BOLD Resident Director & Creative Producer. Supported by a major grant from the BOLD Theater Women’s Leadership Circle, this two-year position recognizes Morita’s proven ability to guide groundbreaking theatrical work as well as her dedication to strengthening the theater field and expanding the possibilities of storytelling on American stages. A visionary initiative created to bridge the gaps for women in American Theater, The BOLD Theater Women’s Leadership circle is funded by the Helen Gurley Brown Foundation. Morita will be working directly with Artistic Director Maria Manuela Goyanes and Managing Director Kimberly Douglas to support their work with strategic planning, flexible producing models, a long-range sustainability effort, fundraising, and external affairs. Morita will also collaborate with the Core Leadership Team to advance Woolly’s artistic impact, and direct at least one production a year in the season. Mina Morita. Photo courtesy of Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. Morita brings almost a decade of leadership experience to Woolly Mammoth. She served as Artistic Director of San Francisco’s Crowded Fire Theater Company (2015–2022), where she built a reputation for producing fearless and complex work. Under her leadership, Crowded Fire grew four-fold, moved to a shared leadership model, and advanced a vital platform of powerful artistic programming. Prior to this, she supported the launch of the Ground Floor, Berkeley Rep’s Center for the Creation and Development of New Work with Madeleine Oldham and Meghan Pressman and led Shotgun Player’s growth to a mid-sized theatre organization as Board President. Morita has worked alongside some of the United States’ most acclaimed playwrights and is currently directing Sanaz Toossi’s WISH YOU WERE HERE, which opens in January 2025 at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California. In 2023 she received the inaugural FrontOffice Mid-Career Director’s Award grant of $25,000, was recognized as a Beinecke Fellow with Yale University in 2022, and has worked with Australia’s National Theatre of Parramatta, La Boite Theatre, and several U.S. theaters, including the Guthrie Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, and Berkeley Repertory Theatre. In 2015, Morita was honored to share her story on TEDx, and in 2016, she was chosen as one of the YBCA100, for “asking questions and making provocations that will shape the future of culture.” Mina Morita shares her excitement in moving to DC to join Woolly and the area’s rich theater community including longtime artistic colleagues Sonia Fernandez, Reggie White, and recent La Mama Umbria mentor Hana Sharif. “Woolly Mammoth is the magnetic center for some of the most daring and transformative work found within the American Theater. I’m deeply honored by this invitation and can’t wait to join Maria, Kimberly, and the team to continue the vital work of creating dynamic theater that sits on the edges of the human experience.” “Mina and I worked together for a hot second years ago, and I have been pining for more ever since! Mina is a courageous, principled, out-of-the-box creative leader and artist. I’m thrilled that she and Adam have decided to move to this coast so she can lend her immense talent to both Woolly and the BOLD Women’s Leadership Circle. I continue to be so grateful to the Helen Gurley Brown Foundation as well as the indefatigable Carol Dunne for the opportunity to mentor and be mentored by such incredible women. I can’t wait to see all Mina accomplishes both onstage and off in this new role, created specifically for her,” says Woolly Mammoth Artistic Director Maria Manuela Goyanes. Carol Dunne, Director of the BOLD Theater Women’s Leadership Circle and Producing Artistic Director of Northern Stage, joins the excitement: “We are thrilled to have an artist of Mina Morita’s caliber join the Helen Gurley Brown Bold Circle. Her fierce commitment to theater that changes the world is a gift to everyone in our cohort and we can’t wait to see the impact she brings to Woolly Mammoth.” ABOUT MINA MORITA Mina Morita (she/her) is a celebrated new plays director, who has worked with Australia’s National Theatre of Parramatta and La Boite Theatres, The Guthrie Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, American Conservatory Theater, Magic Theatre, Center REPertory Company, Campo Santo, Shotgun Players, Playwrights Foundation, Ferocious Lotus, Bay Area Children’s Theatre, and Crowded Fire Theatre Company with such creators as Susan Soon He Stanton, Qui Nguyen, Anna Deavere Smith, Sanaz Toossi, Dipika Guha, Christopher Chen, Dave Harris, Star Finch, Stefani Kuo, J.C. Lee, Lauren Gunderson, Isaac Gomez, Philip Kan Gotanda, Young Jean Lee, Idris Goodwin, Lloyd Suh, Adam Chanzit, Sean San Jose, Min Kahng, and Dustin Chinn. Upcoming, she will be directing Sanaz Toossi’s WISH YOU WERE HERE at South Coast Rep. Mina is a recipient of the inaugural FrontOffice Mid-Career Director’s Award, Theatre Bay Area’s [TBA] Outstanding Direction of a Musical in 2014; nominated by TBA for Outstanding Direction of a Play in 2017, as well as Shellie Awards Best Director in 2018. She was recognized as a Beinecke Fellow with Yale University in 2022. Previously, she served as the Leader of Artistic Curation & Strategy as part of the Shared Leadership Team in 2023 and as Artistic Director from 2015 to 2022 at Crowded Fire Theater Company. From 2011-2015, she was the Artistic Associate at Berkeley Repertory Theatre and its center for the creation and development of new work, The Ground Floor. She has also served as Board President and Treasurer of Shotgun Players; as a 2014 Lincoln Center Director’s Lab participant; as one of the founding members of Bay Area Children’s Theatre; as a panelist with the Zellerbach Family Foundation, San Francisco Arts Commission, Theatre Bay Area, and Hewlett Foundation; as a speaker for the Getty Leadership Summit; lead facilitator for the Lotus Playwriting Retreat with Playwriting Australia; and Guest Artist at Yale’s DGSD, UC Berkeley and Stanford Universities. In 2016, TBA awarded her the 40@40 distinction for her impact on the Bay Area Theater. In 2015, Mina was honored to share her story on TEDx, and in 2016, she was chosen as one of the YBCA100, for “asking questions and making provocations that will shape the future of culture.” ABOUT WOOLLY MAMMOTH The Tony Award-winning Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company creates badass theater that highlights the stunning, challenging, and tremendous complexity of our world. For over 40 years, Woolly has maintained a high standard of artistic rigor while simultaneously daring to take risks, innovate, and push beyond perceived boundaries. One of the few remaining theaters in the country to maintain a company of artists, Woolly serves an essential research and development role within the American theater. Plays premiered here have gone on to productions at hundreds of theaters all over the world and have had lasting impacts on the field. Currently co-led by Artistic Director Maria Manuela Goyanes and Managing Director Kimberly E. Douglas, Woolly is located in Washington, DC, equidistant from the Capitol and the White House. This unique location influences Woolly’s investment in actively working towards an equitable, participatory, and creative democracy. Woolly Mammoth stands upon occupied, unceded territory: the ancestral homeland of the Nacotchtank whose descendants belong to the Piscataway peoples. Furthermore, the foundation of this city, and most of the original buildings in Washington, DC, were funded by the sale of enslaved people of African descent and built by their hands. ABOUT THE BOLD THEATER WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP CIRCLE  Conceived in 2017, the BOLD Theater Women’s Leadership Circle is a visionary initiative created to bridge the career gaps for women in the American theater. A study by Wellesley Centers for Women, commissioned by American Conservatory Theater Artistic, revealed that women hold only 17% of artistic leadership positions in the American regional theater and that the dearth of female theater leaders is not due to a lack of candidates but rather to a clearly observed glass ceiling preventing women from assuming the artistic helm of professional theaters. The BOLD Circle — established by the Helen Gurley Brown Foundation in the spirit of longtime Cosmopolitan magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown and renowned filmmaker David Brown and led by Northern Stage Producing Artistic Director Carol Dunne — creates a network of women artistic directors in professional theaters across the United States and empowers them to address the issues preventing women from advancing in theater leadership. The BOLD Circle offers major support of artistic initiatives focused on women artists and creates a formal mentorship program to train and prepare future women artistic directors to lead, to create, to innovate, and to enhance the place of theater in the American culture. Since its inception in 2017, the BOLD Circle has seen tremendous success with 14 directors and associates reaching major leadership positions across the arts industries, including at the Goodman Theatre, the Alliance Theater, Playwrights’ Center, the McCarter Theater, the Jungle Theater, One Nation/OneProject, on the Broadway production of A Strange Loop, the New York Times, and the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale.