James Dennen

James Dennen is a theater artist and director who has worked in venues and festivals across the US and abroad. He was the founding director of the nationally acclaimed company ED, whose experiments in improvisation—seen at Steppenwolf and Lookingglass in Chicago, among other spaces—explore and expand the limits of presence in the theater. On video, Dennen’s experimental work with live performance, improvisational techniques in narrative development, and documentaries earned a New Television Award through Center for New Television funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. His scholarly work on improvisational theory and practice has been published in The Drama Review and the New England Theatre Journal. Dennen has taught courses on performance theory and practice, acting, directing, devising, dramatic literature, improvisation, documentary filmmaking, expository writing, and public speaking at Harvard and Brown Universities, Kenyon College, and Denison University, where he joined the faculty in 2017. He has an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles, and is ABD in Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University.