DENVER: Curious Theatre Company founders Chip Walton and Dee Covington have announced that they will be leaving the company at the end of the 2022-23 season, the company’s 25th. In the coming season, long-time company member Jada Suzanne Dixon will assume the role of artistic director.
“It’s been an amazing gift to have had the opportunity, along with Dee and so many other amazing Curious artists and supporters, to conjure, to create, and to cultivate Curious Theatre Company,” Walton said in a statement. “It’s also time to look toward the future, and it has been a privilege to help select and support Jada as my successor to lead Curious into the future.”
Added Covington in a statement, “I’ve dedicated my career to ensuring that Curious embraced the highest levels of artistry, to supporting the development of new voices for the theatre, to nurturing our future through young playwrights, and to ensuring our company provided cultural communion for artists and audiences alike.”
Walton and Covington will work in a collaborative capacity throughout the coming season to support the transition in leadership, and will continue directing and performing in productions. The company’s board of directors have unanimously approved Dixon, an actor and director currently serving as associate producer and artist in residence, to take over as artistic director this coming August.
Walton and Covington were part of the group that founded Curious in 1997 and have helped it become a major force for new plays in the Rocky Mountain region. Walton and Covington married in 2011 and have two daughters.
Walton has directed over 50 shows for Curious and has garnered more than 100 local and national awards for his work. He previously served as the president of the National New Play Network and was a part of the inaugural class of Bonfils-Stanton Livingston Fellows. In August, he will begin working as an artistic and business consultant for Curious and will direct the final show of the coming season, Martín Zimmerman’s On the Exhale.
Covington has served as Curious’s education director since the theatre’s founding and headed the award-winning youth playwriting program Curious New Voices. Her directing credits at Curious include The Thanksgiving Play, The Humans, and Hand to God, while her acting credits include God of Carnage and Clybourne Park, for which she was nominated for a Denver Post Ovation award. She will continue to serve as education director for the majority of the 2022-23 season and will help create a transition plan for the department, in addition to acting and directing.
“We are truly grateful to Chip and Dee for their dedication to Curious Theatre and the relentless and amazing work they have crafted here over the past 24 seasons,” board president Jim Steinberg said in a statement. “Jada is an accomplished artist and will be a stellar leader for the company.”
Dixon has been a member of Curious’s artistic company for 10 years, acting in productions like In the Red and Brown Water and Detroit ’67. This season, she directed and performed in American Son and is currently performing in Fireflies.
“I’m looking forward to leading Curious into the next quarter century of bold theatrical work,” Dixon said in a statement. “This is such an amazing opportunity to use both my artistic and leadership skills to build on the foundation created by Chip and Dee in collaboration with our amazing staff and team.”
Curious Theatre Company has cultivated a local and national reputation as a destination for artists and playwrights to foster and develop new work and as a place where audiences are challenged, bringing thought-provoking theatre to Denver.
