Mary Zimmerman (born August 23, 1960) is an American theatre and opera director and playwright from Nebraska. She is an ensemble member of the Lookingglass Theatre Company, the Manilow Resident Director at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Illinois, and also serves as the Jaharis Family Foundation Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. She is currently a faculty member in the Performance Studies department at Northwestern. She has earned national and international recognition in the form of numerous awards, including the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship (1998). She has received more than 20 Joseph Jefferson Awards for her creative work in the Chicago Area and won a 2002 Tony Award for Best Direction for her adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Other notable productions include Eleven Rooms of Proust and The Secret in the Wings. Early life and education Although Zimmerman was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, she spent much of her childhood in Europe, splitting time between her parents’ home outside London in Hampstead Garden, England, and in Paris. Both of her parents were academics at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, her father a physics professor and her mother a professor of comparative literature who studied the author George Sand. Zimmerman studied theatre and performance studies at Northwestern University, where she received a BS in theatre (1982) in addition to an MA (1985) and PhD (1994) in performance studies. Director, librettist, and producer Zimmerman's involvement in stage productions is difficult to categorize, since she may be billed as director, writer, or producer, but usually takes on several of these roles. She is well known for her revivals of old plays and re-adaptions of classical and pre-classical works, librettos for modern operas, and re-presenting modern film and novels as stage plays. Play productions Zimmerman has directed several theatrical adaptations of literary works in addition to Metamorphoses, including Journey to the West, the Odyssey, Silk, Arabian Nights (1994), and The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (2003). In 2004 she directed a production of Pericles, Prince of Tyre at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. Her production was re-staged in 2006 at the Shakespeare Theatre Company Free For All. The following year, Zimmerman directed another Shakespeare play, Cymbeline, at Northwestern University. In 2006 she directed a version of the Greek story of Jason and the Argonauts’ search for the Golden Fleece, Argonautika, at the Lookingglass Theatre Company, and then toured it at