NEW YORK CITY: The Graduate Acting Program at NYU Tisch School of the Arts has announced that Carl Cofield will become the chair of the department in the fall. Cofield will start a three-year appointment as chair in September in conjunction with a six-year appointment as associate arts professor for the program. He will succeed previous chair Mark Wing-Davey and interim chair Janet Zarish. Both Wing-Davey and Zarish will continue as full-time faculty, with Zarish returning to her position as the acting area head.
An esteemed actor and director, Cofield was appointed associate artistic director of the Classical Theatre of Harlem in 2018. There he has directed The Bacchae, Antigone, Macbeth, The Tempest, and Dutchman. Other credits include directing the world premiere of Kemp Powers’ One Night in Miami at Rogue Machine Theater in Los Angeles, Miami New Drama, and Denver Center; A Raisin in the Sun and an Afro-futuristic Twelfth Night at Yale Rep; Henry IV at Oregon Shakespeare Festival; Disgraced at Denver Center; The Mountaintop at Cleveland Play House; and Radio Golf at Everyman Theatre, among others. He will next direct André De Shields in King Lear at St. Louis Shakespeare in June.
Cofield’s work has also included collaborating with playwrights Nathan Alan Davis, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Dipika Guha, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Emily Mann, and Regina Taylor for the McCarter Theatre. As an actor, he has worked at the Manhattan Theater Club, Berkeley Rep, the Alliance, Arena Stage, the Shakespeare Theatre, Intiman, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Milwaukee Rep, Alabama Shakespeare, the McCarter, the Acting Company, and Studio Theatre, among others. He has also received an NAACP theatre award, an L.A. Drama Critics Circle Award, and multiple AUDELCO nominations.
A member of the founding class of The New World School of the Arts in Miami, Cofield holds a BFA in theatre performance from the University of Miami and an MFA in directing from Columbia University. He has also taught at Columbia, NYU, and the New School.
