Elizabeth Craven - Artistic Director

Elizabeth is Artistic Director of the Heritage Music Theatre and Ensemble Theater Collective both in residence at Cinnabar Theater in Petaluma, California. Beginning in the 1970’s Elizabeth was a founding member, actor and director of The Play Group, an acclaimed regional theater located in Knoxville, Tennessee, specializing in original plays about social issues of working people in the rural south. Her second company Western Union Theatre was co-founded with Amy Glazer in 1984 in Petaluma at the Cinnabar Theater and performed there until 1995. From 1996-2006 Elizabeth moved back to Knoxville for ten years where she was Head of the MFA Performance Program at the University of Tennessee and a resident director of the Clarence Brown Theatre Company, a LORT theater founded in 1970 by Sir Anthony Quayle and Ralph Allen. In 2007 she was hired as Executive Director of 6th Street Playhouse in Santa Rosa, CA., guiding it from a $600,000 annual budget to $1 million in just four years. During her tenure as Artistic/Executive director, 6th Street Playhouse was nominated for 14 Bay Area Critics awards was named Best Theater in North Bay for three consecutive years.  Her directorial productions have appeared at The John F. Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., New York City, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Europe.  Locally, her recent productions have won Bay Area Theater Critics Circle Awards for Enchanted April and The Sea Gull.  She is the recipient of two Dean Goodman Awards for directing.  Elizabeth’s artistic life is devoted to the study, teaching and promotion of ensemble based performance inspired by her 30 years of work in international theatre.