MELIA BENSUSSEN is Artistic Director of Hartford Stage and Artistic Director of the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center.

BIO

Melia Bensussen is an award-winning director and artistic leader who has directed extensively at leading theatres throughout the country. The first woman to lead Hartford Stage, she has been its Artistic Director since the summer of 2019. Devoted to new work as well as to classic texts, she was appointed Artistic Director of the National Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill Theater Center in 2024.

Raised in Mexico City, Bensussen is fluent in Spanish and has translated and adapted a variety of texts, including her edition of the Langston Hughes translation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding, published by Theater Communications Group. Among her credits developing and premiering new works, she co-conceived and directed, alongside playwright Kirsten Greenidge, the theatrical adaptation of Anthony J. Lukas’ Pulitzer Prize winning Common Ground, which premiered at the Huntington Theater in Boston.

A graduate of Brown University, Bensussen serves on the Arts Advisory Board for the Princess Grace Foundation, and on the executive board of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC). She is featured in Women Stage Directors Speak by Rebecca Daniels (McFarland and Co.), and in Nancy Taylor’s Women Direct Shakespeare (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press). Her essay on Merchant of Venice is included in Jews, Theatre, Performance in an Intercultural Context by Brill Publishing.

Prior to her position at Hartford Stage, she was Chair of the Performing Arts Department of Emerson College, in Boston, where she is currently a Senior Distinguished Director in Residence. 

She is the recipient of an OBIE Award for Outstanding Direction, as well as the Statue Award from the Princess Grace Foundation for Excellence in Directing.