Lori Leigh is professional playwright, dramaturg, and theatre director based in Wellington, New Zealand. She has received several awards and nominations for her work, including the 2017 Playmarket Adam NZ Play Award (Runner-up) for her play Uneasy Dreams and Other Things, a Wellington Theatre Award (formerly Chapman Tripp) and a nomination for Outstanding New Playwright in 2014 for her play Revelations. Her production of Cassandra Tse’s Long Ago, Long Ago received four Wellington Theatre Awards nominations in 2015, including the award for best new New Zealand play, and her recent production of Finnius Teppett’s Marine Snow (2017) received WTA nominations in all design categories.

As a dramaturg, Lori has worked on Bright Orange Walls theatre company’s award-winning Shakespeare productions, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2015) and Twelfth Night (2016). She has also directed and dramaturged for Wellington Summer Shakespeare and is currently the dramaturg for their upcoming 2019 production of Hamlet. Lori has been Artistic Director of PlayShop Performance Company for five years and won Best Improv in the NZ Fringe Festival Awards in 2015 for her original show 10 Things I Hate About Us.

Lori has a MFA in theatre from Sarah Lawrence College in New York and a PhD from Victoria University of Wellington, where she is currently Programme Director of Theatre and teaches undergraduate and postgraduate theatre as well as coordinating the MFA programme. She presents and publishes widely on Shakespeare, gender and theatre.