MAELI GOREN-WILSON
Circle Builder | Artist | Collaboration Champion
Maeli Goren-Wilson is a multi-hyphenate* artist and educator telling inclusive stories that bring joy.
Maeli is especially drawn to heightened text, plays that uplift the voices of women and trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people, and theater for young audiences. The characters that talk to her inhabit diverse human, puppet, creature, and force-of-nature bodies and experiences. She loves stories that make their own music. She believes children are wise.
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*She writes. She directs. She adapts. She performs. She teaches. She curates. She writes a mean grant application. Her greatest joy is symbiotic collaboration, and she doesn't make anything without offering her whole heart.
HOWDY AND WELCOME!
Maeli pursues theater as a means to an end, and the end is togethering better. She believes in the power of collaborative storytelling as a tool for building more loving, joyful, and just communities. Maeli received her MFA in Directing from Yale School of Drama and BA in Comparative Literature with Certificates in Theater and Brazilian Studies from Princeton University, magna cum laude. As a director, playwright, and teaching artist, she has worked with regional theaters and educational organizations across the East Coast and Midwest, including but not limited to: Playmakers Laboratory, Imagination Theater, Interrobang Theatre Project, Something Marvelous, Silk Road Rising, and Chicago Dramatists in Chicagoland; Princeton Summer Theater and The Lewis Center for the Arts in New Jersey; Yale Cabaret, Yale Center for British Art, Dwight-Edgewood Project, and Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, CT; Manton Avenue Project, Trinity Repertory Company, and Rhode Island Latino Arts in Providence, RI; and Portland Stage in Portland, ME. As a theater leader and administrator, Maeli served as Co-Artistic Director of the Yale Cabaret's historic socially distant 53rd season in 2020-2021 and was the Managing Director of 16th Street Theater in Chicago from 2016-2018. Maeli served as the Theater Director at Pingree School in South Hamilton, MA from 2021 until 2024, where she held space for high school drama on and off the stage. She now works with the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum in Skillman, NJ and with Princeton University's Program in Theater. She is also currently adapting Quan Barry's hilarious novel, We Ride Upon Sticks, into a new musical with her co-writer Allison Spann. Check out @fieldhockeycoven1989 on Instagram to follow the project!
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