Faculty Research Connections Profile
Professor of Directing Robin Witt has been on faculty at Charlotte since 2010. Most of her professional directing work is in Chicago, where she is a member of both Steep Theatre and Griffin Theatre Company. The courses she teaches include Play Analysis, Directing I and II, and In-Yer-Face and Beyond: British Theatre from 1995 to Present. She directs in the Department of Theatre season. Past productions at UNC Charlotte include These Shining Lives, Far Away, Women of Trachis, The Children’s Hour, Hamletmachine, 4.48 Psychosis, The Seagull, and Project/Hope.
Professor Witt’s research is the directing of new plays from the UK as well as the resurrection of lost and forgotten plays from the inter-war years. She has helmed many US premieres of contemporary plays with the focus on introducing international playwrights to American audiences. Some venues she has worked include Steppenwolf Theatre, Goodman, Writers Theatre, Northlight, Edinburgh Festival, Everyman Theatre, and Lookingglass Theatre. Her productions have garnered multiple awards, and her work has been featured and reviewed both nationally and internationally, including in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Time Out Chicago, The Week, Chicago Sun-Times, British Theatre Guide, and other print and online media.
Most recently, Professor Witt directed the US premiere of Tony and Olivier award-winner Simon Stephens’s Light Falls for Steep Theatre, where she has been an ensemble member for 15 years. In the fall of 2022, Steep Theatre received a 2.9 million-dollar grant from the Federal Government to purchase and renovate a new performance space in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago. Witt will be directing the inaugural production in the new Steep space in February of 2025. She is currently collaborating with actor Kendra Thulin (Columbia College) and designer/playwright Aly Amidei (University of Wisconsin at Madison) on a one-person play, which will be performed in various intimate venues across the United States beginning in March of 2024.
With co-writer Associate Professor Susan B. Harden, Professor Witt’s book chapter, “Interview theatre and the Dream Act: Activism through raising community voices” was published in S. Wong & A.M. Foerster Luu (Eds.), DREAM Act Activists & Teacher Allies: Are You Listening? Teachers College Press. She is also the recipient of the 2019 College of Arts + Architecture Board of Governors Teaching Award and the National Opera Association Award, 2nd Place for the UNC Charlotte production of The Merry Widow, 2014-2015.
Professor Witt holds an MFA in Directing from Northwestern University and a BFA from New York University Tisch School of the Arts. She is the daughter of stage and television actor Howard Witt.
Thank you for your interest in theatre at Charlotte!