Robert J. Orchard

Mr. Orchard served as the American Repertory Theater’s founding Managing Director for twenty-one years. He currently serves as Executive Director of the A.R.T. and the Institute for Advanced Theater Training, and Director of the Loeb Drama Center at Harvard University. Prior to 1979, he was Managing Director of the Yale Repertory Theatre and School of Drama, where he also served as Associate Professor and Co-Chairman of the Theater Administration Program. For nearly twenty years, Mr. Orchard has been active facilitating exchanges, leading seminars, and advising on public policy with theater professionals and government officials in Russia. At the A.R.T. he has produced close to two hundred productions over half of which were new works. In addition, he has overseen tours of A.R.T. productions to major festivals in Edinburgh, Avignon, Belgrade, Paris, Madrid, Jerusalem, Venice, São Paulo, Tokyo, Taipei, Singapore, and Moscow, among others. Under his leadership, the A.R.T. has performed in eighty-one cities in twenty-two states, and worldwide in twenty-one cities in sixteen countries on four continents. Mr. Orchard has served as Chairman of both the Theater and the Opera/Musical Theater Panels at the National Endowment for the Arts, on the Board and Executive Committee of the American Arts Alliance, the national advocacy association for the performing and visual arts, and as a trustee of Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the national service organization for the American professional theater and publisher of American Theatre magazine. In addition, he has served on the Board of the Cambridge Multi-Cultural Arts Center and as President of the Massachusetts Cultural Education Collaborative. In 2000, Mr. Orchard received the Elliot Norton Award for Sustained Excellence.