To: Senior Administrators
From: Katherine Baicker, Provost
Subject: Court Theatre Leadership Appointment
Date: July 22, 2025
I am delighted to announce the appointment of Avery Willis Hoffman as the Marilyn F. Vitale Artistic Director of Court Theatre, effective November 1. In this role, she will shape and implement the theatre’s artistic vision and programming.
Avery is a visionary theatre producer, artistic director, and curator with a lifelong commitment to performance. She began her professional stage career at age 12 and has since built a career spanning directing, dramaturgy, producing, and working closely with artists to incubate cross-disciplinary performance projects. Her academic grounding in Greek and Roman drama and Shakespeare, along with her sustained approach to storytelling as a tool for inquiry, connection, and transformation, aligns powerfully with the Court Theatre’s mission to reinterpret classic works for contemporary audiences.
For nearly two decades, Avery has collaborated extensively with director Peter Sellars on global theatre, opera, and dance productions including Shakespeare’s Othello, Mozart’s Zaide, and Toni Morrison’s Desdemona, along with cultural festivals such as the New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna. She also served as international tour producer for Park Avenue Armory’s FLEXN.
Her theatre practice has been shaped by wide-ranging leadership across the arts, including her most recent role as the inaugural artistic director of the Brown Arts Institute and professor of the practice of arts and classics at Brown University, where she led the opening of The Lindemann Performing Arts Center. Avery also launched several major initiatives, including the Artistic Innovators Collective, a gathering of local, national, and international artists across disciplines; IGNITE, a multi-year, campus-wide arts series; and ArtsCrew, an arts workforce development program. At Brown, she also curated faculty and student collaborations and residencies with artists such as Theaster Gates, Carrie Mae Weems, William Kentridge, and Tanya Tagaq.
Previously, Avery was the inaugural program director at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City, where she developed public programs focused on artistic experimentation and the arts as stimulators of civic dialogue. Additionally, she led content development for the permanent exhibitions of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina.
Avery holds a DPhil and MSt in classical languages and literature from the University of Oxford, where she was a Marshall Scholar, and a BA in classics and English from Stanford University.
I want to thank the members of the search advisory committee for their thoughtful work throughout this process. I also extend my appreciation to Charles Newell for his extraordinary leadership over more than three decades as Court Theatre’s Marilyn F. Vitale Artistic Director.
Please join me in welcoming Avery and celebrating this exciting new chapter for Court Theatre, a cultural institution that is vital to the University, the South Side community, and the city of Chicago.