Janice is the recipient of the Kennedy Center Gold Medallion Award for her work with new plays. She has directed over 80 new works, uptown and down, across the country, from university to Off-Broadway. Recently she directed Last Train to Nibroc via Zoom – fully staged. And the radio play Rose Colored Glass for WPKN and Ripple Effect Artists. At the Gym at Judson was the Off Broadway premiere of Richard Hoehler’s lauded solo piece, I of the Storm, “a spectacular show”…Broadway World. Janice continues to direct June Ballinger’s Remembrance Day, “executed with glorious finesse”…NYTheatre Guide” up and down the East Coast. As Producing Artistic Co-Director of AND Theatre Company, Janice has overseen the production and development of over 100 new plays. For AND she has directed Gary Garrison & Roland Tec’s The Rubber Room, Kristine Niven’s Lights Out! Dark in the Library, Buried in Time, numerous Eclectic Shorts, Boxers & Briefs, and Go Solos!
FUKT by Emma Goldman-Sherman was scheduled for production, April 2020. When the quarantine is lifted rehearsal will recommence!
Other recent work includes Jon Fraser’s Mrs. Thule Will Not Be Coming Back for New Circle Theatre Company, Café Pen by Kristine Niven, and Libby Scala’s Felicitas, at the Player’s Theatre, The Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Alaska, The Stop Gun Violence Now Theater Festival, Speedball at the Kennedy Center, Autumn Run (also co-author), These Shining Lives at Adelphi University; Flyovers by Jeffrey Sweet, working with Sandy Shinner of Victory Gardens in Chicago and featuring Richard Kind and Tony Award Winner Michele Pawk. For FringeNYC she directed the solo shows That Dorothy Parker and After Anne Frank (both award winners for directing and acting, and selected for Fringe Encores) and The Gathering Room (best actor winner). She directed the Off-Broadway premiere of Rose Colored Glass, which she co-authored, is published by Samuel French, Inc., and has had performances across the US and Europe. Summers have included directing at Okoboji Summer Theatre.
Janice is co-author of 12 plays with Susan Bigelow and directed each in Northern California, as well as Bindlestiff’s Dance Hall, commissioned for the National Eco-Drama Festival & featured in American Theater Magazine. Their play Autumn Run was also selected for CAP21’s Blackjacks Project and performed at Suffolk College. It is currently being developed into a feature film. Her work ranges in scope from mime to musical, from contemporary farce to courtroom drama, from plays for women to plays full of testosterone. She has directed new works of such celebrated playwrights/composers as Carol Hall, Joe Pintauro, Betty Shamieh, Eric Loo, Gary Garrison, Roland Tec, Arlene Hutton, Mosi Singleton, Dakota Powell, Scott Carter, Tom Diggs, Molly Smith Metzler, Zac Kline, Caridad Svich, Jon Fraser, Emma Goldman-Sherman, Mark Dunn, Fred Stroppel, Kristine Niven, and Gregory Fletcher.
She is the recipient of a Pilgrim Project Grant, a Writer/Director Residency at the Dorset Writers’ Colony, VT and has been honored for her work at NYU and the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. She has been a guest artist/director at NYU, Johns Hopkins, Adelphi University, Long Island University, SUNY Suffolk, Kingsborough, Humboldt State, College of the Redwoods, SUNY Brockport, and CAP21 and she is on the Dramatists Guild Institute Plays in Progress faculty. Janice teaches the intensive workshops “Writing and Performing the Solo Show” and “Nail-the-Job” Cold Reading Workshop and is a Zoom coach for actors, non-actors, corporate folks and those inbetween. She wrote and directed an industrial for M&M*MARS and is a founding member of the First Look Theatre Company for New York University’s Dramatic Writing Program, a member of New Circle Theatre Company (Circle Rep), SDC, and the Dramatist’s Guild.
Janice studied under the legendary Leland Starnes and Stanley Harrison from Yale University. She leads her Nail-the-Job workshops in Cold Readings and Auditions for students all over the country. She coaches trial attorneys and she speaks to folks from all over the world about New York City.
