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Debbie Saivetz is a theater director, actor and educator whose work aims to transport audiences more deeply inward and more attentively outward, toward the other and the unknown. Her work investigates the imagistic capacity of actors, the emotional power of design and the electrified theatrical field connecting them. Her interests include plays that experiment with theatrical form and language, the porous membrane between dreams and everyday life, and the collision of old stories and our contemporary world.

Debbie's New York directing credits include The Conduct of Life for the Maria Irene Fornes marathon (Public Theater); Stephanie Fleischmann's Sound House, inspired by British electronic composer and inventor Daphne Oram (New Georges), Julius by Design (Fulcrum Theater), Mexican playwright Javier Malpica's Our Dad is in Atlantis (Working Theater/Queens Theater-in-the-Park) and Sarah Ruhl's LATE: A Cowboy Song (Clubbed Thumb). For the Mexico/United States Playwright Exchange at the Lark Play Development Center, she directed new translations of works by Alberto Castillo, Mario Cantú Toscano, Irela de Villers, Cutberto López, Jorge Celaya and Verónica Musalem.

Her international directing projects include Bess Wohl's Pequeños sonidos con la boca/Small Mouth Sounds (TAI Escuela Universitaria de Artes, Madrid), Musalem's Rebanadas de vida/Slices of Life (Teatro San Ginés, Santiago, Chile; Lab Trece, Mexico City), Sarah Ruhl's Eurídice/Eurydice (Casa de los Teatros, Oaxaca, Mexico) and La Casa limpia/The Clean House (Teatro Helénico, Mexico City). With Teatro la Llave in Santiago, Chile, she has directed works by playwrights such as Dea Loher, Roland Schimmelpfennig and Wajdi Mouawad.

Highlights of her work as an actor include Exodus: LONEtheater/TeatroSOLO, a site-specific intervention created by transdisciplinary artist Matías Umpierrez for NYC's Underground Zero Festival, and The Mormon Project, created in collaboration with director JoAnne Akalaitis, writer Eric Overmyer and production designer Kristi Zea.

Debbie is a Drama League Directing Fellow, an Affiliated Artist with New Georges, an alum of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab and WP Theater Director's Forum, and a former resident director at New Dramatists. She is a member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, Actors' Equity Association and the National Alliance of Acting Teachers. She is the author of An Event in Space: JoAnne Akalaitis in Rehearsal, published by Smith & Kraus.

Specialization

Directing
Acting

Resume/CV