Tom Bentley-Fisher
Theatre Director	Writer	Master Teacher
Tom Bentley-Fisher is an award winning theatre director, teacher and writer. He has worked throughout Canada, the United States and Europe for over thirty years. He has directed over one hundred productions, taught at numerous universities and theatre schools, and served as the artistic director of five professional theatres. During Tom’s tenure as an artistic director in Canada he gained a strong reputation for developing and producing original plays. He is the founder and producer of several theatre festivals, including the Saskatoon International Fringe. In Canada he is best known for his twelve year tenure as artistic director of Twenty-fifth Street Theatre. Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, credited his leadership of this theatre as having engineered “one of the most dramatic come-backs in Canadian theatre history.”    From 2002 to 2009 Tom lived in San Francisco where he concentrated on writing, conducting his own acting studio, and working as a dramaturge and director for many Bay Area theatres. This included three years as producer of the Global Age Project, Aurora Theatre’s international new play development program in Berkeley. During his time in California, Tom’s fiction was published in literary magazines both in the U.S. and Canada. His first collection of short stories was published by Thistledown Press. He has been the finalist for several literary awards, written three produced plays, and is currently completing a novel and a book based on the acting technique he developed during his time teaching in California.   In 2009 he spent five months in Barcelona creating and directing a critically acclaimed all-female version of the Iliad (Iliada) for Q-ars Teatre, produced for the prestigious Grec 09 International Festival of Barcelona. The production was remounted in several Catalan theatres during the 2009/2010 season. In July 2010 the production, then translated from Catalan to Spanish, was honored to be included in the Festival de Teatro Clásico de Mérida, Spain, where it performed in Teatro Romano, a Roman theatre built in the first century BC and designated as a UNESCO Heritage Site.   Presently Tom divides his time between Barcelona and Saskatoon, where he is the artistic director of Tant per Tant, an international theatre company dedicated to the translation and production of Canadian and Catalan plays. Most recently Tom directed the Catalan Connection, an exchange project which involved bringing three of Barcelona’s most innovative new playwrights and their work to audiences and theatre professionals in theatre centres across Canada.  Upcoming projects include Connexió Canadenca, a project introducing Canadian playwrights and their translated plays to Catalonia, directing the English World premiere of Pau Miró’s Buffalos in Saskatoon, and continuing to conduct ongoing master classes in the U.S. Canada and Spain.
TomBentley99@hotmail.com
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