Arthur Feinsod
Biography of Dr. Arthur Feinsod
Arthur B. Feinsod received his BA degree from Harvard (magna cum laude and phi beta kappa); a MA degree from UC Berkeley in Dramatic Art; and a PhD from NYU’s Performance Studies Department in the Tisch School of the Arts. He taught at Trinity College from 1985 to 2001 as an assistant and associate professor in the Theater and Dance Department and at Indiana State’s Department of Theater from 2001 until his retirement in May 2021 as full professor. At Indiana State, he taught playwriting, directing, theater history, theater theory and mask acting, and at the Indiana State Honors College, he taught courses in the ancient and modern “great and enduring works.” At Trinity College he was the recipient of the Arthur Hughes Award for Outstanding Teaching and at Indiana State he received multiple teaching and research awards, including the Caleb Mills Award for Outstanding Teaching, the Theodore Dreiser Award for Excellence in Research and Creativity, and Teacher of the Year Award voted on by honors students in the ISU Honors College. He was Visiting Professor in Theater and the Humanities at the University of North Carolina Asheville in Spring 2001 where he taught directing, theater history as well as the Great Works of the Ancient World in their celebrated Humanities Program.
Besides having directed plays and musicals of many genres and styles in the professional and academic theater worlds since 1971, he served as Artistic Director of three different companies in his fifty-year theater career: the Crossroads Repertory Theatre in Indiana; Theatre 7, also in Indiana; and the Berkeley Lights Theatre Ensemble. As a director internationally, he has staged plays in Mannheim and Heidelberg, Germany; in Budapest, Hungary; and in different cities in Croatia, including Zagreb. As a playwright, his play Coming to See Aunt Sophie, the true story of Jan Karski, has been performed professionally in Mannheim, Germany; in three cities in Poland, including Warsaw; and in Sydney, Australia as well as in Chicago, Terre Haute, Bloomington (Indiana), and Marquette. His play Between the Dams was performed in Budapest directed by the late director Anna Lengyel. As a director, he specialized in directing classics, having staged: Sophocles’ Antigone; the Medieval Morality Play Everyman; Cervantes’ The Cave of Salamanca; Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors and Winter’s Tale; Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters (in commedia half-masks); Ibsen’s A Doll’s House; Chekhov’s Sea Gull, Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya; Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (which toured to Croatia); Yeats’ Purgatory; Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (which toured to Germany); Wilder’s Our Town (presented at the Nebraska Repertory Theatre); Miller’s Death of a Salesman; The Fantasticks; Godspell; and Agnes of God (which won a Midwest Region theater directing award for outstanding production). In the mid-1990’s Feinsod was the Resident Dramaturg at the Regional award-winning Hartford Stage Company, where he served under theater directors Mark Lamos and Bartlett Sher.
From 2018 to 2022, he was co-founder and the first president of the Interfaith Council of the Wabash Valley. In his official capacity as president, he toured as a lecturer on faith, interfaith and humanitarian topics such as ending the death penalty in the United States; the importance of standing up to hate; faith and the arts; as well as themes from the great books that relate to faith and interfaith subjects.
As a theater scholar he wrote The Simple Stage published by Greenwood Press. As a playwright/dramaturg he compressed all of William Butler Yeats’ Cuchulain poems and plays into a single work entitled Sword Against the Sea. It was published by Samuel French and toured to Sligo, Ireland, Yeats’ hometown co-sponsored by the Yeats Society. More recently, he wrote a chapter on Broadway director Arthur Hopkins for Volume One of a multi-volume work published by Methuen Press on Great North American Stage Directors. Over the years he has published essays on visual artists Raymond Jonson, American stage designers, and on Syrian American artist Soulaf Abas. These essays have appeared in journals and art catalogues. He has also published essays on ending the death penalty and on Polish hero of the Holocaust Jan Karski. His first book of poetry is entitled Outside the Lines (official publishing date April 24, 2026). It is published by Poets Choice, a publishing company based in Mumbai, India. His publisher is Akshay Sonthalia. His literary agent is Sally Bird.
