SITI's Executive Director Megan Wanlass to Step Down After 19 Years

Siti Company's Board of Directors announces that Executive Director Megan Wanlass will step down from the Company following 19 years of transformational service. Wanlass joined SITI as Stage Manager in 1995, eventually becoming Managing Director and then Executive Director in 2000. During her tenure, SITI grew into a fiscally stable and internationally renowned theater ensemble. Wanlass helped to create over 35 productions, which premiered in or toured to 88 cities, 32 states and 19 countries. Most recently, she played a significant role in the successful launch of SITI's new year-round Conservatory. Wanlass and her family are relocating to the Los Angeles area where she will serve as Managing Director for Cornerstone Theater Company.

"Megan Wanlass has been a close partner and collaborator over the past nineteen years," said Artistic Director Anne Bogart. "I am grateful for her vision, creativity, and commitment and I will miss her. But I am also proud of who she has become in the American theater landscape."

Longtime Board member and former Board chair Jaan Whitehead commended Wanlass for her wonderful service and commented, "Having worked with a number of theaters, I have deeply appreciated the dedication, integrity and love Megan has brought to SITI over the years. It has made it possible for the theater to move ahead in many creative ways. Cornerstone is lucky to have her for its new administrative leader."

SITI's Board of Directors has launched an international search for a new Executive Director and has appointed current Deputy Director Michelle Preston as Interim Executive Director.

Founded in 1992, Siti Company has sought to redefine contemporary theater in the United States through an innovative approach to collaboration, cultural exchange, and actor training. With the idea of the ensemble as its guiding principle, SITI has served as a creative home for a core group of artists: ten actors, four designers, the director Anne Bogart, and a stunning list of international collaborators. Working together, SITI has not only reimagined what is possible both on and off the stage, but, more broadly, what it means to be a global artist in the new millennium.

Siti Company is an ensemble theater company based in New York that tours extensively throughout the United States and internationally. SITI is dedicated to the creation of new work, the training of theater artists, and to international collaboration. Founded in 1992 by Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki, SITI seeks to redefine and revitalize contemporary theater in the United States through an emphasis on international cultural exchange and collaboration.

SITI provides a rich context where the interaction of art, artists, audiences and ideas inspire the possibility for change, optimism and hope. The company believes that through the practice of collaboration, a group of artists working together over time can have a significant impact upon both contemporary theater and the world at large.

Through the Company's performances, educational programs and collaborations with other artists and thinkers, SITI continues to challenge the status quo, to train to achieve artistic excellence in every aspect of our work, and to offer new ways of seeing and of being as both artists and as global citizens.

SITI has traveled to 22 countries on five continents and created more than 35 new productions including such iconic works as Under Construction (2009), The Medium (1994), Death and the Ploughman (2004), bobrauschenbergamerica (2001), War of the Worlds-The Radio Play (1999), Hotel Cassiopeia (2006), and a triptych of solo pieces inspired by great artists: Bob (1998), Room (2000), and Score (2002) as well as a collaboration with the Martha Graham Dance Company, American Document (2010).

Among the countless accolades SITI as a whole, as well as its members individually, have garnered are: seven OBIE awards; two Guggenheim Fellowships, Doris Duke Artist Award, USA Artists Rockefeller Fellowship; American Theatre Wing's Henry Hewes design award, Best Foreign Production at the Dublin Festival, and several Drama Desk Award nominations, among others.