The inaugural Leon Katz Award has been given to Paul Walsh, Professor in the Practice of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the Yale School of Drama.
Paul has taught causes in theater history, dramatic literature, and translation for the stage at Yale since 2008. Prior to coming to Yale, he taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (2005-2008) and Southern Methodist University (1989-1996). From 1996 to 2005, he was dramaturg and director of humanities at the American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) in San Francisco.
In addition, Walsh has worked as dramaturg with theater companies across the country, including collaborating for many years with the Minneapolis-based Theatre de la Jeune Lune, serving as dramaturg and co-author on such award-winning Jeune Lune productions as Children of Paradise: Shooting a Dream, Don Juan Giovanni, Germinal, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. In 1994, Walsh received a Theatre Communications Group/Pew Charitable Trusts National Theatre Artist Residency Grant to continue his work with Jeune Lune. The version of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol that Walsh co-authored with former A.C.T. artistic director Carey Perloff has played in San Francisco since 2005. From 2006 to 2012, Walsh served as artistic director of the New Harmony Project, a new play development residency program located in southern Indiana.
Walsh’s translations of plays by Henrik Ibsen (A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, Hedda Gabler, Master Builder, and John Gabriel Borkman) have been produced at A.C.T., Aurora Theater, Yale Repertory Theater, People’s Light, the Stratford Festival, and the Williamstown Festival, among others. His translations of August Strindberg’s five Chamber Plays were published by Exit Press in 2012 after premiering at San Francisco’s Cutting Ball Theater, which also produced his translation of Strindberg’s A Dreamplay in 2016.
Walsh has published essays and articles in The Production Notebooks, Re-interpreting Brecht, Strindberg’s Dramaturgy, Theatre Symposium, Essays in Theatre, Studia Neophilologica, Canadian Theatre Review, and Contemporary Literary Criticism Yearbook. He holds a Ph.D. from the Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama at the University of Toronto.