Jeanmarie Simpson Bishop

Jeanmarie is the Founding Artistic Director of Arizona Theatre Matters, founded in 2012. She also founded in 1989 the Nevada Shakespeare Company (NSC), from which she retired in 2008. With NSC, she directed many projects, wrote original works, and played myriad parts, including Maud Gonne in Sailing to Byzantium, Gertrude in Hamlet, Lady M in Macbeth, and Elsa in The Road to Mecca, directed by Zakes Mokae. Jeanmarie wrote and performed hundreds of times (including a run Off-Broadway) the play A Single Woman, about the life of first US Congresswoman and lifelong pacifist Jeannette Rankin. She also starred in the film version that featured Judd Nelson, the voices of Martin Sheen and Patricia Arquette, and the music of Joni Mitchell. In 2007, she appeared at the historic Beverly Hills Theatre 40 in the American premiere of the solo tour-de-force Shakespeare’s Will, directed by Leonard Nimoy. Jeanmarie toured the world with Coming In Hot, in which she played 19 American women who had served in the military from the Viet Nam to contemporary eras. She was commissioned by the Be the Change project to create a piece based on interviews with Dreamers; Liberty’s Children premiered at the Potential Workshop in Reno, Nevada, in March 2014. She toured the world again with her original solo performance work, HERETIC, from 2011-2019. The piece explores the life and struggles of Quaker martyr Mary Dyer, hanged in Boston in 1660. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona.