Howard Sherman

Howard Sherman is a theatre administrator, writer, and advocate. He has been executive director of the American Theatre Wing and the O’Neill Theater Center, managing director of Geva Theatre, general manager of Goodspeed Musicals and public relations director of Hartford Stage. He was also interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts and has worked at Manhattan Theatre Club, the Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays, and the Westport Country Playhouse.

Since 2012, he has been the US columnist for The Stage newspaper in London, and in 2018 was named Contributing Editor of Stage Directions magazine. His writing has appeared in a number of publications including Slate, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and American Theatre magazine. Howard hosted the podcast Downstage Center from 2004 to 2011, interviewing more than 300 theatre artists including Stephen Sondheim, Angela Lansbury, Andre de Shields, Anna Deveare Smith, and B.D. Wong.

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Howard inspired The 24 Hour Plays Viral Monologues project, which has created hundred of new short works, the earliest of which were collected into a book, with Howard serving as editor.

Howard was cited as one of the Top 40 Free Speech Defenders in 2014 by the National Coalition Against Censorship and received the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund’s “Defender” Award in 2015; he frequently consults, writes and speaks on issues of censorship in both academic and professional theatre and he has been interviewed on the topic by outlets including The Washington Post and TheFire.org‘s “So To Speak” podcast.