Bill Rauch

Bill Rauch is the inaugural artistic director of Perelman Performing Arts Center. His work as a theater director has been seen across the nation, from low-income community centers to Broadway in the Tony Award®-winning production of Robert Schenkkan’s All The Way and its sequel The Great Society, as well as at many of the largest regional theaters in the country. His other New York credits include the world premiere of Naomi Wallace’s Night Is A Room at Signature Theatre, the New York premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House at Lincoln Center Theater, and a site-specific Occasional Grace in multiple Manhattan churches for En Garde Arts.

From 2007 to 2019, Bill was artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), the country’s oldest and largest rotating repertory theater, where he directed seven world premieres and 20 other plays including several by Shakespeare as well as innovative productions of classic musicals including a queer re-envisioning of Oklahoma! Among his initiatives at OSF, Bill committed to commissioning 37 new plays to dramatize moments of change in American history. “American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle” has resulted in such watershed plays as Lynn Nottage’s Sweat (winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize), Paula Vogel’s Indecent, the 1491s’ Between Two Knees, Lisa Loomer’s Roe, Universes’ Party People, Culture Clash’s American Night, and both of Robert Schenkkan’s plays about LBJ, among others.

Bill is also co-founder of Cornerstone Theater Company where he served as artistic director from 1986 to 2006, directing more than 40 productions, most of them collaborations with diverse rural and urban communities nationwide. He has directed world premieres at Portland Center Stage, Center Theater Group, and South Coast Rep, and has directed multiple times at American Repertory Theater, Yale Rep, the Guthrie, Arena Stage, and Seattle Rep, as well as at Long Wharf Theatre, Berkeley Rep, Pasadena Playhouse, and Great Lakes Theater Festival. His production of The Pirates of Penzance performed at the Portland Opera.

Bill twice won the Independent Reviewers of New England Award. He is also the recipient of the 2018 Ivy Bethune Award from Actors’ Equity Association for his commitment to diversity in casting and producing, a 2015 Ford Fellowship, the 2012 Fichandler Award from the Society of Directors and Choreographers, the 2010 Theatre Communications Group’s Visionary Leadership Award, the 2009 Margo Jones Medal for his commitment to living writers, and the 2008 United States Artists Prudential Award. Other honors include Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Award nominations for Best Direction of All The Way, as well as Helen Hayes, Ovation, Los Angeles Weekly, Drama-Logue, Garland, and Connecticut Critics’ Circle Awards, and he is the only artist to have won the inaugural “Leadership for a Changing World” award from the Ford Foundation.

He was a Claire Trevor Professor at the University of California Irvine and has also taught at the University of Southern California and U.C.L.A. Bill was educated at Harvard College. He lives in New York City with his husband Christopher Liam Moore and their two children, Liam and Xava Rauch-Moore.

Photo by Matt Murphy.