Hannah Hessel Ratner is the Audience Enrichment Manager at the Shakespeare Theatre Company. At STC, she runs the Creative Conversations discussion series which includes a range of discussion formats bringing together scholars, artists and audiences in conversation about the plays. She writes regularly for the Asides magazine and blog, as well as edits the annual Guide to the Season . She also oversees the free performance series Happenings at the Harman, which presents music, dance and theatre over a happy hour drink. She is a Producing Playwright with The Welders playwright's collective where she recently dramaturged the world premiere of Stephen Spotswood's Girl In The Red Corner. She has been an ensemble member at Forum Theatre for nearly a decade where she has served as production dramaturg for a wide variety of plays, old and new including Mad Forest, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, Clementine in the Lower Nine, Pluto and Stephen Spotswood’s Walking in the City of Silence and Stone. In 2011, she founded the Project Gym, a center for creative development. She has dramaturged productions locally for Olney Theatre Center, Rorschach Theatre, and the Source Festival. She has served on selection panels for the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Source Festival, Velocity DC and The Playwrights Center. She has taught workshops on theatre, text and performance for ages ranging from elementary to adult. For five years she served as the Literary Director, Outreach and Education Associate at Theater J, where she worked on a variety of plays old and new. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, she holds an MFA in dramaturgy from Columbia University.

New Plays, Audience Engagement, Arts Education, Adult Education, Dramaturgs as Producers, Creativity training, Shakespeare

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