Leadership

ROBERT FORD (Artistic Director) has helped produce over 100 plays and musicals since co-founding TheatreSquared in 2005 and has facilitated 85 development projects through the Arkansas New Play Festival (ANPF). He has written 10 full-length plays, including his first, Tierra del Fuego, which won the Stanley Drama Award, following development at the former Mount Sequoyah New Play Retreat in Fayetteville. Most recently T2 premiered In the Grove of Forgetting following staged readings at the 2023 ANPF, Budapest English Theatre, and TimeLine in Chicago. Past seasons have included Fault (T2), The Spiritualist (T2, New Harmony Project, Stages Rep, where the Houston Press called the play “at once riotously funny, musically engaging, and sweetly complex”), The Fall of the House (Alabama Shakespeare Festival — Edgar Award nominee, T2), Look Away (Southern Writers Project, T2), “Girl Band in the Men’s Room” (Hollywood Fringe—Best Theatre Award), and ‘Twas the Night (T2). His play My Father’s War has appeared in the US, UK, Italy, and Germany. For T2 he directed Drawer Boy and his own adaptation of It’s a Wonderful Life. Other adaptations for T2: Great Expectations and two versions of A Christmas Carol, co-adapted with Amy Herzberg. His critically acclaimed first novel, The Student Conductor, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, a “Hidden Gem” on NPR’s Morning Edition, and the first novel to win two fiction awards from the Texas Institute of Letters. A professional musician, he studied flute and composition at both the Manhattan and Yale Schools of Music, where he received a Master of Music degree. As a young musician he won second prize in the 1983 Koussevitsky Competition, among other distinctions. More recently he performed as a flutist with both NASO and SONA in Northwest Arkansas. Bob was born in Scotland, grew up in Michigan and New Jersey, and has lived in Fayetteville since 1998 with his wife, actor/director Amy Herzberg. In addition to his music degree, he holds MFAs in acting from Rutgers and in playwriting & screenwriting from the Michener Center for Writers, University of Texas at Austin.