Sheila Siragusa
I work at the intersection of social justice, social work, and the arts, focused on how we track the human story, assembling all that we encounter into a larger understanding of how the world works.
Policy Fellow Sheila Siracusa is tapping her work experience in research and analysis, particularly around environmental and energy policy, as she contributes to the Beyond 2025 Action Hub.
Additionally, Sheila teaches Acting, Directing, and First Folio Shakespeare in Performance, and is a professional stage director based in the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts. She has served on the faculty at NYU’s Stella Adler Conservatory, State University of New York in Oneonta, Central Connecticut State University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Smith College.
Sheila is one of the founders of KO Theatre Festival and the August Company. She has directed, acted in, composed, and written more than 15 original plays. Notably, she worked with Peter Lobdell on his highly acclaimed play Immunity and with Liesel de Boor on her productions entitled OnWords: Gone, OnWords: Chekhov, and OnWords: Terror. She sang backup on Erin McKeown’s 2011 album F*ck That and composed and recorded an album of original renditions of Shakespeare’s songs with Chickspeare. Sheila has directed at the following theaters: Chester Theatre Company (Memory House, An Iliad, Mercy of a Storm, Blackbird and the New England premiere of Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus’s Crime and Punishment); New Century Theatre (Sunset Limited and The How and the Why and Hold These Truths); Academy of Music in Northampton (Sweet Sweet Spirit, Building the Wall, and Harley Erdman’s original play Nobody’s Girl); and the Abingdon Theatre Company (Personals). With the August Company, she directed first folio versions of Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, and As You Like It. Her original play Water, a movement/theatre piece about privatization of natural resources, was the recipient of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival’s Theatre for Social Justice Award. She also directed staged readings of The Things They Carried, and The Catonsville Nine (with Howard Zinn). She worked with librettist Harley Erdman and Composer Eric Sawyer on their original opera, Garden of Martyrs.
Sheila’s areas of scholarship include Shakespeare in performance, script analysis, directing, musical composition, and play development. She contributed a chapter entitled “Offred’s Journey Through Gilead” in Karen Ritzenhoff’s and Janis Goldie’s anthology, The Handmaid’s Tale: Teaching Dystopia, Feminism, and Resistance Across Disciplines and Borders. Her profile on Ervin Staub and Laurie Ann Pearlman’s work on reconciliation and healing trauma in Rwanda, entitled, “Musekeweya: A Rwandan Radio Drama for Peacebuilding” was published in Ecumenica in the Spring of 2013.
Sheila earned a Master of Fine Arts in directing for the stage from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is pursuing a Master of Social Work degree at Boston University in the clinical track.