Mary Hall Surface

Washington

Mary Hall Surface is a playwright, director, and teaching artist. She is devoted to intergenerational audiences, multidisciplinary collaborations, and to transforming communities, museums and schools through the arts. Based in Washington, DC, her plays have been produced across the US, Europe, Japan, Taiwan and Canada, including eighteen productions at the Kennedy Center. A nine-time nominee for Washington’s Helen Hayes Awards, she received the 2002 Outstanding Director of a Musical for Perseus Bayou, one of six musicals created with composer David Maddox. She recently wrote and directed Color’s Garden, a play inspired by the cut-outs of Henri Matisse, for Washington’s National Gallery of Art, where she is also the founding instructor of their popular Writing Salon. Through the Kennedy Center and Harvard’s Project Zero Classroom, she works with educators around the world to embrace the power of theatre. She deeply enjoyed being the founding artistic director of DC’s Atlas INTERSECTIONS Festival, where she curated over 600 all-arts performances and events from 2009–2015.