Lee Breuer

Career Trajectory

Lee Breuer's artistic trajectory began in San Francisco's experimental theatre scene in 1963, where he directed avant-garde productions before co-founding the collective Mabou Mines in 1970, establishing himself as a fearless innovator willing to dissolve boundaries between theatre, film, music, and visual art. His crowning achievement came with The Gospel at Colonus (1983), a radical reimagining of Sophocles that became a landmark of American performance and established him as a major figure in contemporary theatre. Over a career spanning more than fifty years, Breuer remained committed to challenging theatrical convention, earning a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997 and becoming the first non-European to direct at the Comédie-Française's Salle Richelieu in 2011.