About

Marty Chandler is a dramaturg, creator, and collaborative theatermaker, passionate about theater that sparks dialogue, art that illuminates the human experience through spontaneity, and anything that makes us laugh.

 

Growing up in a single-parent, low-income family from Auburn, Washington, Marty attended Yale University on full financial aid as a QuestBridge Scholar. There, they received their B.A. in Theater & Performance Studies and Psychology while directing an improv group (“Lux Improvitas”), volunteering with Yale Children’s Theater, and pursuing projects as a playwright, dramaturg, and deviser. Their play Schema premiered as a staged reading; another play, A Butterfly in a Barbershop was selected for the Yale Playwrights Festival; and they collaborated with a team to devise a long-form-improv-meets-solo-performance piece Do Your Happy Dance, Jericho! as their senior thesis project. They received the Marina Keegan Prize for Excellence in Playwriting as well as the James S. Metcalfe Prize for theater writing. 

 

Marty worked for three years as an undergraduate admissions officer at Yale, where they grew to combine theater with college access work, using improv exercises to help students learn about applying to college. They moved to New York to become a 2050 Administrative Fellow and later, the Education & Engagement Associate at New York Theatre Workshop, where they supported and facilitated intergenerational theatermaking programming (“Mind the Gap”) in NYC, the Berkshires, and London, and worked as the Associate Director & Dramaturg for the Workshop’s youth devising ensemble (“Youth Artistic Instigators”). 

 

These collective experiences in applied and community-engaged theatre inspire Marty’s work now as a dramaturg pursuing their M.F.A. in Dramaturgy & Dramatic Criticism at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University.

 

In addition to their dramaturgy and administrative experiences, Marty has also performed at FringePVD (Providence Fringe Festival), as a guest artist/dramaturg in Every Brilliant Thing at the Yale Schwarzman Center, and in “The Pin,” a performance piece on The High Line and The Shed created by Pilvi Takala. They are a graduate of The Second City Conservatory & Grad Revue Program. With their absurdist sketch/performance group Alternative Medicine, they played a sold-out eight-month residency at NYC’s The PIT, made their off-Broadway debut at The Theater Center, and performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

 

Today, they continue to follow the same youthful impulses of spontaneous creativity that first inspired their theatrical interests, whether that means running around in a garbage bag dress on Instagram to solo improv shows in their apartment to putting eyes on ramen to tell a two-minute love story.