Program Assistant
Élise C. Hanson is a playwright, novelist, actor, theatre producer, and director native to Bountiful, Utah. As an actor, notable roles include Hamlet in Hamlet, Harper Pitt in Angels in America, Lucy Barker in Sweeney Todd, Nanny in Baby with the Bathwater, Tamora in Titus Andronicus, Beatrice in Kill Claudio!, and Henry in Henry V. Hanson is a classically trained actor and received certification in the Meisner technique. She is the artistic director and founder of Kallisti Theatre Company and the executive producer of New World Shakespeare Company. In 2022, she founded The Utah Grassroots Theatre Collaborative, a group of producers, performing artists, and self-funded theatre creatives local to Northern Utah who make theatre happen by the skin of their teeth. Her organization The Mad Badgers Dramatic Society connects emerging playwrights with actors for reading and workshopping new scripts. Hanson is a major proponent of all things independent theatre, and has fostered a handful of companies and individuals in Utah in efforts to strengthen the arts community.
Hanson's plays have been commissioned and developed by Wasatch Theatre Company, Puck's Rude Mechanicals, The Weird Sisters Theatre Group, Rotten in Denmark Productions, The Hive Theatre, Las Vegas Theatre Company, New World Shakespeare Company, Athena Project Arts, The David Fetzer Foundation, and The Seacoast Theatre Alliance. She is the playwright in residence and dramaturg for New World Shakespeare Company and Kallisti Theatre Company, and an early modern literature specialist with an emphasis on Shakespeare and the Theatre of the Absurd. Hanson's plays have been the recipient of several Fringe Festival Awards, the George Plautz Playwright Award, and the Arthur Adamov Le Printemps Award. Her works Craven, Kill Claudio!, The Rest is Silence, The Open Syrup series, The Secret Son of Hitler, Uninhabitable, and others have been workshopped and produced in the greater United States.