James (Jim) Fisher
James Fisher, Professor and Head of the Theatre Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, is a director and theatre scholar. He is the 2007 recipient of the Betty Jean Jones Award for Excellence in the Teaching of American Theatre from the American Theatre and Drama Society. Fisher has directed and acted in over 150 theatre productions and has also authored several books, including
The Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope (NY: Routledge, 2001), three bio-bibliographies (Spencer Tracy, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor) for Greenwood Press,
The Theatre of Yesterday and Tomorrow: Commedia dell’arte on the Modern Stage (Mellen, 1992), and the forthcoming
Historical Dictionary of the American Theatre: Modernism, co-authored with Felicia Hardison Londré. He has published numerous essays and reviews in a wide range of publications, has held several research fellowships, edited six volumes of
The Puppetry Yearbook, serves as book review editor for
Broadside, the publication of the Theatre Library Association, and has edited
Tony Kushner: New Essays on the Art and Politics of the Plays (McFarland, 2006) and the forthcoming
“We Will Be Citizens”: New Essays on Gay and Lesbian Drama (McFarland, 2008). Fisher was 1999-2000 McLain-McTurnan-Arnold Research Scholar at Wabash College, where he taught for twenty-nine years, and was named “Indiana Theatre Person of the Year” by the Indiana Theatre Association in 1997 for his direction of Tony Kushner’s
Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches. Fisher has also written two plays in the
commedia dell’arte tradition,
The Bogus Bride, which has had several productions including an Off-Broadway staging at New York’s Primary Stages, and
The Braggart Soldier, a free adaptation of Plautus’s
Miles Gloriosus, first produced in 2006. He received his M.F.A. in Directing at UNCG in 1976.
