About Sabrina

Sabrina Peck is a well-known professional director and choreographer and has been a trailblazer in the field of community-engaged theater. She created CityStep while a Harvard student and has continued to support the student-run CityStep programs as executive director of the nonprofit CityStep.org.

Peck’s original community engaged theater productions include Commodities, with Commodities Traders on Wall Street; Speaking our Streets, with residents of the West End in Durham and NC field and factory tobacco workers; Odakle with Bosnian refugees in Croatia; common green/common ground with NYC community gardeners; and To the River, with 40 children from Clinton Hill in Manhattan, sponsored by Dancing in the Streets.

As a director, Peck is known for directing movement-infused plays, including Overcome by Amy Brenneman, Jessica Litwak’s My Heart is in the East at LaMama Experimental Theater Club, Mouth Wide Open with Amy Brenneman at the American Repertory Theater and The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek by Naomi Wallace at the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College. Peck and playwright Chiori Miyagawa conceived and developed Antigone Project, a reimagining of Sophocles by contemporary women playwrights. Peck also directed Dawn Saito's Blood Cherries, Lenora Champagne's Wants, and Shishir Kurup’s adaptation of Julius Caesar for the Play On! Festival at Classic Stage in New York.

Peck choreographed The Clean House at Lincoln Center Theater, written by Macarthur-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl. She has also choreographed works for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the New York Shakespeare Festival, Arena Stage, as well as many inventive music-theater adaptations of classic plays for the Cornerstone Theater Company, directed by Bill Rauch.

She has taught community-engaged performance at Columbia University, Duke University, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and Brooklyn College; at Harvard, she served as the Peter Ivers Visiting Artist, where she created The Garden in Winter, and co-taught the Wintersession course, Personal Narrative Through Performance. She has also guest taught classes at Bard College, Hunter College, and Lincoln Center Theater. She served as a mentor and coach for students at the Juilliard School and the Yale School of Drama. Her outreach includes speaking at the Public Interested Conference at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; a panelist at the Annual conference for the Association for Theater in Higher Education (ATHE): “Site-Specific Theater and the Transformation of Memory”; the NYC Arts in Education Face to Face conference; The Stage Directors and Choreographer’s Society symposium, Directing a New American Theater; and the Theater without Borders’ symposium, The Future of International Exchange. Most recently she was a Visiting Artist in the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, directing the dance and community-engagement evening in celebration of Ellington’s masterwork, Such Sweet Thunder.

See Sabrina’s most recent project with Amy Brenneman at Cotuit Center for the Arts in Cape Cod.