IRENE ALBY
Director/Actor/Content Creator
Irene Alby is a Director, Writer , Choreographer and Actor. Her Kid's Dramedy TV series Secret Movements of Plants was an Official Selection at the Catalyst Creator Festival 2022. New York Acting credits include Aase in Peer Gynt directed by Andrei Serban, The Dancing Fox with the Mettawee River Theatre and Serban’s Benvenuto Cellini at the NY Metropolitan Opera as well as performances at the Ohio Theatre I.C.E. Factory Theatre Festival, the Producer’s Club, St. Veronica’s Church and the Theatre of the Riverside Church.
Regional Directing credits: A Christmas Carol in 2016 and 2017 for West Virginia Public Theatre; Co-directing the award-nominated Love’s Labour’s Lost for Pittsburgh Shakespeare in the Parks (2021), Jenny Schwartz's God's Ear for GTC. Acting: Pittsburgh Shakespeare in the Parks’ Julius Caesar, Cymbeline, and Hamlet as well as performances with Bricolage Theatre and Steel City Shakespeare. GTC: Laura Wade's Breathing Corpses, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and A Midsummer Night's Mysteries in collaboration with the Toledo Symphony. International professional credits include The Stronger and Molly Bloom: Fragments (two virtual solo performances for the Global Women’s Performing Arts Festival in Busan, South Korea.) In Canada, she was an actor/company member of The Other Theatre/L'Autre Théâtre, performing in "Kaspar", Year Zero and Human Collision/Atomic Reaction which was presented at the 1999 Festival de Théâtre des Amériques and won the Montreal English Critics Circle Award(M.E.C.C.A.) for “Best Direction” and “Best Production”. She is a founding artist of the Glacity Theatre Collective (GTC) and Stray Dogs International, and is a member of the Director' Lab North.
Currently, a Professor of Theatre at Montgomery College, she previously worked as a Teaching Associate Professor of Directing/Director of the Youth Theatre Academy at WVU School of Theatre and Dance, and a full-time Senior Lecturer in Acting at the University of Toledo Department of Theatre and Film. She has directed over 15 productions including: Exit, Pursued by a Bear, Sonnets for an Old Century, New Anatomies, Henry V, Machinal, In the Next Room /The Vibrator Play, The Arabian Nights, Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love. Her production of The Adding Machine was invited to tour to the 2015 KCACTF REGION II Festival. In 2011 She co-directed a Korean-language production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at Kookmin University in Seoul, Korea.
She received her MFA in Acting at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, studying under Kristin Linklater, Andrei Serban, Anne Bogart, Slava Dolgachev and Nikolaus Wolcz, and her BFA in Theatre at Concordia University in Montreal. She also studied Corporeal Mime for three years at the Ecole De Mime Omnibus, trained in Pol Pelletier's Dojo, and learned Body logic with Oleg Kisselev. She is a Certified CYT 200 Yoga Teacher and Social Emotional Learning Facilitator with Breathe For Change. Areas of specialization include Linklater Voice and Movement, The Viewpoints, Commedia Dell'arte, Grotowski's Plastics and Meyerhold's Biomechanics. She is the Conference Planner for the VASTA Focus group at the ATHE 2024 Conference.