Theatre for a New Audience announces that celebrated, OBIE Award-winning director Arin Arbus will be its next Artistic Director when Founding Artistic Director Jeffrey Horowitz steps down on August 31, 2025, after a 46-year tenure. The appointment follows an extensive nationwide search led by Arts Consulting Group.
Arbus began working at TFANA in 2004 as an assistant on productions, a receptionist in the office, and the coordinator for the gala, before serving for over a decade as the Theatre’s first Associate Artistic Director.
Arbus credits TFANA for its profound influence on her artistic development: it was Horowitz who first invited her to direct Shakespeare. In 2009, Arbus made her Off-Broadway and TFANA debut with Othello, starring John Douglas Thompson in the title role, Juliet Rylance as Desdemona, in her American debut, and Ned Eisenberg as Iago. The production was a New York Times Critic’s Pick and described as “among the most sensitively directed, eloquently designed and impeccably acted productions of a Shakespeare tragedy that the city has seen in years.”
Following Othello, Arbus staged praised productions for TFANA of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, starring Jefferson Mays; Macbeth, featuring Annika Boras and John Douglas Thompson; The Taming of the Shrew, starring Maggie Siff and Andy Grotelusechen; Much Ado About Nothing, starring Maggie Siff and Jonathan Cake; King Lear, with Michael Pennington in the title role; and The Winter’s Tale starring Kelly Curran and Anatol Yusef. In addition to Shakespeare, Arbus has directed contemporary plays for TFANA such as Strindberg’s The Father, in a newly commissioned adaptation by David Greig which Arbus developed, and Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, adapted by Thornton Wilder and performed in repertory by a single company led Maggie Lacey and John Douglas Thompson; andthe first major New York revival since 1998 of Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, for which Kecia Lewis won an OBIE Award for performance and Arbus won an OBIE for direction. Upon leaving her Associate Artistic Director post in 2017, Arbus served as TFANA’s Resident Director, helming the New York Premiere of Denis Johnson’s Des Moines; Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, with Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks; and The Merchant of Venice, starring John Douglas Thompson as Shylock (which also played at The Shakespeare Theatre Company in DC and The Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh—Arbus’ UK debut.
Outside of TFANA, Arbus’ productions include the world premiere of Deep Blue Sound by Abe Koogler for Clubbed Thumb, which was remounted this Spring at The Public; The Lehman Trilogy, by Ben Power and Stefano Massini, at Shakespeare Theatre Company in DC and at The Guthrie in Minneapolis; the Tony-nominated revival of Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, starring Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon; The Rape of Lucretia, composed by Benjamin Britten at Houston Grand Opera; and Verdi’s La Traviata at Canadian Opera Company (8 Dora nominations), Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Houston Grand Opera.
Arbus is a Drama League Directing Fellow, a Princess Grace Award recipient, a TFANA Samuel H. Scripps Award winner, and an alum of Soho Rep’s celebrated Writer/Director Lab.
Arbus has been a guest professor of theatre at Yale, Juilliard, NYU, Brooklyn College, Fordham, Columbia, and The New School, and developed a keen passion for what excites and moves the next generation of theater-makers and theatergoers. Just as education has become a natural extension of her directing practice, performances for New York City public school students at TFANA have always struck a chord with her. “Their imaginations catch fire, they gain confidence and a deeper connection to our society,” she says. Community engagement—whether in leading a theatre company of prisoners inside a medium security prison for six years with Rehabilitation Through the Arts or in directing an Arabic adaptation of The Tempest for residents of a Syrian refugee camp in Greece with The Campfire Project—has also been central to her work: “Theater is a place where the barriers that divide us in ordinary life can disappear,” she says.
About leading TFANA, Arbus says, “It’s the greatest honor of my career to carry forward Jeffrey Horowitz’s remarkable legacy at TFANA, an institution that has shaped me and been my artistic home for the past 15 years. I’m deeply inspired by the heart of TFANA’s mission. We produce Shakespeare today because his language and ideas illuminate the urgent questions of our time. And by presenting his plays and other canonical texts alongside today’s boldest voices, we engage in a civic dialogue that spans centuries, expanding the definition of ‘classical’—and shaping the canon of the future.
I’m excited to collaborate with TFANA’s dynamic staff, artists, audiences and board to create thrilling theater that entertains and provokes, that grapples with the complexities of our world, theater that brings together a diverse and ever broadening community to spark our imagination, embrace our contradictions, and deepen our shared understanding of what it means to be a human.”
TFANA Board Chair Robert E. Buckholz says, “We’re truly honored and delighted to have an artist of Arin’s caliber taking on TFANA’s artistic leadership. We’re confident she will build on the great foundation Jeffrey has laid and will lead this wonderful organization to the next level.
Horowitz says of Arbus, “Arin gets to the heart of what plays are about and why theatre is essential. She pushes boundaries and is profoundly unsatisfied by the satisfactory. Artists want to work with Arin. She is a wise and brilliant person with a gift of humor. Actors in her productions express the language and ideas of authors naturally and spontaneously. I am thrilled the Board has chosen Arin and that Arin has chosen to lead the theatre.”
When Horowitz accepted the Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2019, he said that founding TFANA in 1979 was “one of the best decisions [he] ever made.”
Now, as Arbus steps in to lead the organization into the future, she takes an approach deeply rooted in its mission which she’s so familiar with and fiercely passionate about. She looks forward to harnessing the Polonsky’s capacity for, as she describes, an “epic scale [that] fosters an intimate connection between actor and audience, enabling artists to swing for the fences as they realize their own ‘most rare vision(s).’”
She says: “We’re going to support the most innovative artists in our field, from those early in their careers to those who seem to have been forgotten. We’re going to produce the work of playwrights who, like Shakespeare, address our world through rigorous experiments with form and language. We’re going to provide a New York home for international masters and find new ways to engage with audiences, artists, students, board, and staff.” TFANA is in the midst of a national search, also led by Arts Consulting Group, for a new Executive Director, who will work in partnership with Arbus.