Michael Ouellette, was trained, at Brown and Harvard, to teach literature.  But while he was teaching English and Humanities at St Mary’s College of Maryland, theater “hit,” and he went back to graduate school to retool.  After earning an MFA in Southern Methodist University’s Professional Theater Training Program, he free-lanced as an actor and director in Chicago, where he also was Artistic Director of Bailiwick Repertory, for the opening of which he directed a highly successful production of his own edition of Shakespeare’s Pericles.  While in Chicago, he was on the faculty of the University of Illinois, teaching voice and acting.  Since returning to the east coast, he has taught at Skidmore College and, since 1989, at MIT, where he is now Director of Theater.  At MIT, he has directed over fifteen productions and acted in three others.  He was the recipient of the 1996 Gyorgy Kepes Fellowship Prize, awarded by the MIT Council for the Arts.  Most recently he has acted at the New Rep in Newton and at the Williamstown Theater Festival, where he was the Acting Instructor for the Apprentice Program for several years.  In the premiere of an MIT collaboration, the oratorio Reckoning Time by Peter Child and Alan Brody, he created the role of Peter.  He wrote the libretto for Charles Shadle’s opera, Coyote’s Dinner, which was premiered at MIT in the fall of 2002 and arranged the texts for Dr Shadle’s cantata, A New England Seasonal.
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