Michael Bloom

Michael Bloom is a writer and director and the former artistic director of Cleveland Play House. In addition to Emma, his plays include The Fagin Effect (based on Oliver Twist) and adaptations of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise and Ostrovsky’s Artists and Admirers. His latest play is Christmas Freud, a holiday comedy based on an essay by David Rakoff. He is also the author of Thinking Like A Director, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

At Cleveland Play House he directed Rich Girl, Ten Chimneys, Thornton Wilder’s Heaven’s My Destination, The Glass Menagerie and Well, among others. World premiere productions include Dinner With Friends at the Humana Festival and Sight Unseen at South Coast Rep and subsequently off-Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club, for which he received a Drama Desk nomination. He has also directed at American Repertory Theatre, Huntington Theatre Company, Geffen Playhouse, Old Globe Theatre, Seattle Rep, Kansas City Rep, and Williamstown Theatre Festival. In Japan he directed The Glass Menagerie and The Miracle Worker.