Susannah Tresilian is a theatre director and audio documentary-maker.  She founded Ariadne in 2014 to find women whose work in theatre in conflict zones around the world is changing the society they live in. 

As Artistic Director of Envision Theatre (2002-9) she worked from the UK and Italy (where she lived for three years) specialising in the dissemination and exploration of international collaborations. She now works freelance often in collaboration with the European Theatre Convention and the Nottingham Playhouse. She co-founded ‘Echo Viva’ a multi-national, multi-disciplinary arts festival in Italy, and ‘Palaver: Theatre and Language’ at the Contact Theatre in Manchester.

Sponsored in 2008 by the Arts Council England and the European Theatre Convention, she spent a formative year as Assistant Director at the Nottingham Playhouse (UK), the Comédie de Saint-Etienne (France), and the Zagrebacko Kazaliste Mladih (Croatia). She directed ‘The Island’, an ETC co-production for the Nottingham Playhouse (UK) and Det Norske Teatret (Norway), 2009-2011. She curated and directed Playhouse etc. for the Nottingham Playhouse at the NEAT 11 Festival in May 2011, see short film about NEAT here.  And ran NEAT 16 Studio in 2016.  She directed Golden Fables 2012 as part of the Olympic Cultural Legacy Trust, working with Ian McMillan, Liz Lochhead, Gillian Clarke, Joel Stickley and Gabriel Prokofiev.

She directed H Mhtepa Moy H Mhdeia (My Mother Medea) by Holger Schober at ΘΟΚ (THOC, National Theatre in Cyprus).  She has been on the UK Reading Committee for the European Theatre Convention’s ‘European Theatre Today – A Selection of the 120 best contemporary European plays for the stage’.

She worked on a new play with Sara Pascoe called ‘The Endings’, directed ‘Posh’ by Laura Wade at the Nottingham Playhouse and Salisbury Playhouse in 2015, and went undercover to Belarus with composer Isobel Waller-Bridge to work with the Belarus Free Theatre on a new opera.

She produces The Books Podcast for The Guardian, and has begun making podcasts for Opera Holland Park.

She is also a freelance BBC radio producer, having worked for twelve years on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour (which has played an enormous part in informing her perspective on gender balance), and arts programmes on BBC Radio 3 and the BBC World Service.  She speaks four languages and frequently gives workshops around Europe on acting, directing and European Theatre.

She now lives in London, sings for the St Martin in the Fields chamber choir, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Her website is: www.susannahtresilian.com