Meet our Director of New Works, Luan Schooler

Director of New Play Development

Prior to joining Artists Rep in 2015, Luan worked with many theaters around the country, including Perseverance Theatre, Denver Center Theatre Company, Cal Shakes, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Cleveland Play House, A Traveling Jewish Theatre, Play On!, and Berkeley Repertory Theatre. She has developed new plays with exceptional artists including David Edgar, Naomi Iizuka, Salman Rushdie, Dominique Serrand, Rinde Eckert, Leon Ingulsrud, Lisa Peterson, Paula Vogel, Per Olav Sorensen, Molly Smith, John Luther Adams, and many others. Following a seven year tenure as Literary Manager/Dramaturg at Berkeley Rep, Luan took a seven year hiatus from theatre during which she became a cheesemonger and opened a shop in Northeast Portland.

In 2015, she joined returned to theatre and was appointed by Artists Rep to launch Table | Room | Stage, the theatre’s new play development program. Through T|R|S, she commissioned and developed work with Yussef El Guindi (The Talented Ones), Larissa FastHorse (The Thanksgiving Play), Andrea Stolowitz (Recent Unsettling Events), Linda Alper (Shanghai), Dael Orlandersmith (Shades Between Two Worlds), Hansol Jung (Wolf Play), Steve Rathje (Signs), Anthony Hudson (Looking for Tiger Lily), and through second productions, Isaac Gomez (La Ruta) and Mike Lew (Teenage Dick) Presently, Luan is working with E.M. Lewis on The Great Divide, which was co-commissioned with Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s American Revolutions program, with Kareem Fahmy on American Fast, and is in the early stages of developing a new musical. In ART’s Mercury Company, Luan served as dramaturg/generative artists on sixteen of the forty-two projects between June 2020 and August 2021.

In addition to developing new work at ART, Luan has provided production dramaturgy on many shows over the last seven seasons (The Miracle Worker, Mothers and Sons, We Are Proud To Present, The Skin of Our Teeth, Trevor, A Civil War Christmas, Marjorie Prime, Feathers and Teeth,The Talented Ones, The Importance of Being Earnest, Caught, The Humans, Magellanica, I and You, Skeleton Crew, Teenage Dick, Wolf Play, The Revolutionists, 1984, La Ruta, Indecent, and The Chinese Lady). As a director at ART, Luan has taken on the World Premiere of The Thanksgiving Play, Doll’s House, Part 2, and The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, and in Spring 2022, she will direct Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children.