Jody McAuliffe, Professor of the Practice of Theater Studies

Please note: Jody has left the "MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts" group at Duke University; some info here might not be up to date.

Jody McAuliffe (MFA, Yale University) 

Award-winning director, writer, adapter, dramaturg, translator, scholar and teacher whose artistic work has been seen across the country. Her directing combines theater, film, documentary, literary adaptation, dramaturgy and the development of new work. Her writing encompasses multiple genres: short fiction; film, literary, and cultural criticism; literary non-fiction; a novel. 

Directing Credits: Abrons Arts Center, Mark Taper Forum, South Coast Repertory, Denver Center Theatre, Virginia Stage Company, North Carolina Shakespeare Festival, Duke Performances, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Sundance Institute, L.A. Theatre Center, Great Plains Theatre Conference, Burning Coal, Manbites Dog Theater, Private Theatre. Member SDC.  

Publications include The Mythical Bill, A Neurological Memoir; My Lovely Suicides; Crimes of Art and Terror; Mysterious Actions: New American Drama, Guest Editor, South Atlantic Quarterly; Plays, Movies, and Critics; Foreword to Sibyl Kempson’s Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag; Gulag Follies in Ethics and Images of Pain (an essay about her theatrical adaptation of Shalamov's Kolyma Tales); Reflections on a Director's Process, Afterword to Peter Weiss’s The New Trial.  Short fiction in South Atlantic Quarterly. Literary Imagination, and Southwest Review.  Reviewed theatre for Norwegian Shakespeare and Theatre Magazine.  

Resident Artist at Abrons Art Center, New York, she adapted and directed Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist (also part of Duke Performances season) in collaboration with Jim Findlay, Rachel Jett, Jess Barbagallo, and Tanya Selvaratnam.   Recent projects include dramaturgy on True Pearl with David Lang and Sibyl Kempson (2018 premiere at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston), directing Barbara Hammond's We Are Pussy Riot for Theater Previews at Duke (also dramaturg), and dramaturgy for Sibyl Kempson's Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag at Abrons Art Center in New York City. Collaborators include Don DeLillo, Wole Soyinka, Sibyl Kempson, Frederick Neumann, Neal Bell, Allan Havis, Nilo Cruz, Erin Cressida Wilson, Clay Taliaferro, William Noland, Joseph L. Guindi, Barbara Hammond, Marlane Meyer, Julie Hebert, Donald Margulies, Anna Deavere Smith, Lewis Black, Robert Auletta, Reynolds Price, Young Jean Lee, Megan Mostyn Brown.  Her adaptations have been produced at Manbites Dog Theater, Abrons Arts Center, Duke Performances.

As chair of theater studies, she revived the professional producing arm of the department, Theater Previews, and presented New Works Labs by Sibyl Kempson and Barbara Hammond (both New Dramatists) and hosted The Builders Association for a workshop with freshmen in the Focus program she created--Liveness: Digital Media & Performance. Received a Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation Grant to study new play development at Scotland’s Traverse Theater.  Convener of the Mellon funded Humanities Writ Large Performance and Integrated Media; Guest Director and Guest Faculty at the National Theater Institute at the O’Neill Theater Center; Director of the Duke in Chicago Arts Entrepreneurship Program which she created; Guest Artist at Great Plains Theatre Conference; National Endowment for the Arts Directing Fellow at the Mark Taper Forum and member of the Directing Workshop for Women at American Film Institute. Her video work has screened at AFI, North Carolina Museum of Art and festivals.  She was Associate Producer on Metromedia Producers' Tom Cottle. Up Close.

As a Duke Faculty Fellow in Social Innovation & Entrepreneurship, she hosted a panel on domestic terrorism with Tim Nichols, Executive Director, Counterterrorism and Public Policy Fellowship Program, and Fellows after a performance of her adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent from the point of view of Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber: The Perfect Detonator.  

She is a recipient of Duke’s Trinity College Distinguished Teaching Award.

Contact Info:

Office Location:	Campus Box 90680, Professor of the Practice, Durham, NC 27708
Office Phone:	(919) 660-3363
Email Address:
Web Page:	http://fvd.aas.duke.edu/~mca

Teaching (Fall 2024):

• THEATRST 145S.04, ACTING Synopsis

  Bryan Center 127, MW 08:30 AM-09:45 AM

• THEATRST 190FS.01, FOCUS PROGRAM SPECIAL TOPICS Synopsis

  Bryan Center 127, MW 10:05 AM-11:20 AM

  (also cross-listed as DANCE 190FS.01, NEUROSCI 190FS.01)

• THEATRST 282S.01, WRITING MOVIES: ADAPTATION Synopsis

  Page 106, M 01:25 PM-03:55 PM

  (also cross-listed as CINE 302S.01, ENGLISH 227S.01, RUSSIAN 282S.01, VMS 321S.01)

Education:

M.F.A.	Yale University	1980
B.S.	Northwestern University	1976
Pushkin Institute	Moscow, U.S.S.R.

Specialties:

Russian
Directing
Literary & Cultural Criticism
Film
Acting

Research Interests: Literary & Cultural Criticism, translation, Russian theater

Jody McAuliffe (MFA, Yale University) Publications: The Mythical Bill, Literary Anthology for Novello Press (2010); My Lovely Suicides (2007) Crimes of Art and Terror(with Frank Lentricchia, 2003); Mysterious Actions: New American Drama, Guest Editor, South Atlantic Quarterly (2000); Plays, Movies, and Critics (1993). Adaptations: The Italian Actress; My Lovely Suicides (Semi-Finalist, Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Center National Playwrights Conference), Manbites Dog Theater Other Voices Series. Literary criticism: Journal of Modern Literature; South Atlantic Quarterly; "Reflections on a Director's Process," afterword to The New Trial, by Peter Weiss (2001). Fiction: South Atlantic Quarterly;Literary Imagination; Southwest Review. Former National Endowment for the Arts Directing Fellow at the Mark Taper Forum and member of the Directing Workshop for Women at American Film Institute, she has developed and directed new plays nationally and regionally: including Marlane Meyer’s "The Mystery of Attraction," Pacific Playwrights Festival, South Coast Repertory; Neal Bell's "Shadow of Himself," New Play Summit, Denver Center Theater; "The Special Prosecutor," her translation/adaptation of Gogol's "Inspector General"; her adaptation of Shalamov's Kolyma Tales--Gulag Follies; and her adaptation of Don DeLillo's Mao II. She reviews New York theatre regularly for The Norwegian Shakespeare and Theatre Magazine. A member of Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, she is a recipient of Duke’s Trinity College Distinguished Teaching Award.

Curriculum Vitae

Representative Publications   (More Publications)

1. McAuliffe, J, The Mythical Bill, A Neurological Memoir, Sightline Series (2013), University of Iowa Press
2. McAuliffe, J, My Lovely Suicides (a novel) (2008), Ravenna Press
3. Lentricchia, F; McAuliffe, J, Crimes of Art and Terror (November, 2003), pp. 200 pages, University of Chicago Press, ISBN 9780226472089  [abs] [author's comments]
4. Plays, Movies, and Critics, edited by McAuliffe, J (1993), Duke Press
5. Jody McAuliffe and Frank Lentricchia, translated into Turkish by Ayrinti Yayinlari, Crimes of Art and Terror (2005)
6. Various, , Mysterious actions: New American drama, edited by McAuliffe, J; Noland, W, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 99 no. 2/3 (2000), pp. 273-275, Duke University Press (Guest Editor.) [doi]
7. McAuliffe, J, Standing on End, Southwest Review (Spring, 1989) (short story.)
8. McAuliffe, J, The Imaginary Letters of Heinrich von Kleist to the Poet Holderlin, Literary Imagination (Winter, 2001) (fiction.)
9. McAuliffe, J, Mythical Bill: An Inordinately Bright, Dreary Life, in Topograph: New writing from the Carolinas and the landscape beyond, edited by Jackson, J (2010), Novello Festival Press
10. McAuliffe, J, Gulag Follies, in Ethics & Images of Pain (2012), Routledge
11. McAuliffe, J, Enda Walsh - med unik scenisk fantasi, Norwegian Shakespeare and Theatre Magazine (2011)
12. McAuliffe, J, Lucia Joyce as Cordelia and the Fool, Journal of Modern Literature (2005)  [author's comments]
13. McAuliffe, J, Boos etterkommere (Descendants of Boo), Vagant Magazine, Norway (September, 2006)  [author's comments]
14. with Frank Lentricchia, Groundzeroland, in Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after 9/11, South Atlantic Quarterly (2003)
15. William Noland, The Image World of Mao II, South Atlantic Quarterly (2003) (contains my notes on William Noland's images.)
16. McAuliffe, J, Reflections on a Director’s Process, in The New Trial, edited by Weiss, P (2001), Duke University Press (translated by Evers, K; Rollerston, J.)