Peter Lichtenfels is a professional theatre director and writes on Shakespeare and contemporary performance. From 1981-1991 he was the Artistic Director of the Traverse Theatre during the Scottish National resurgence in Britain, and the Theatre Director (Artistic and Executive) at the Leicester Haymarket Theatre where he introduced radical international and alternative theatre to the UK. He has championed crosscultural theatre throughout his career, and is committed to interdisciplinary work between theatre, dance and performance art. Between 1991 and 2003, he combined his professional theatre directing with an academic post at Manchester Metropolitan University, the only university conservatory program in the UK.

Major productions from this period included: Still Moon on Fire a music-theatre piece commissioned by the Canada Council (1996), for which the lead singer won a Dora award (analogous to a Tony or an Olivier award in Canada), and a production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Flies at the Stratford Festival of Canada in 2003. He directed Endgame at Shakespeare Santa Cruz (2007), and he is currently working on a production of Romeo and Juliet for the Dramatic Arts Centre in Shanghai, which will open in November 2008 and tour to Beijing.

Since arriving at UC Davis in 2003, he has continued to write articles and has just completed a co-written book on Romeo and Juliet: Negotiating Shakespeare’s Language (Ashgate 2008) which is accompanied by a full critical edition just up on the web. He has also served as Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance 2004-8, and has created exchanges with Shakespeare’s Globe London, and the Shanghai Theatre Academy. He currently sits on the oversight committee of the Mondavi Centre for the Arts.