Juanita Rockwell is a writer/director specializing in the development of new works. Her produced writing include The World is Round (opera), Waterwalk: Surface and Depth (gamelan opera), A Cave in the Sky (play w/puppets), Lunar Pantoum (text for dance theater), Dead for a Ducat & Between Trains (plays w/songs), Upstream (radio play), Packing/Pecking & Across the Void (10 minute plays) and Playing Dead (translation).

As Artistic Director of Company One Theater (Hartford), she directed dozens of early premieres by such groundbreaking playwrights as Paula Vogel, Rachel Sheinkin and Suzan-Lori Parks. Other direction includes projects at Everyman & Theatre Project (Baltimore), The Ontological, Mabou Mines/Suite, Culture Project & Blue Heron (NYC), City Theatre (P’burgh), and radio plays for WNYC, WBGO, WWUH, WHUS and NPR.

Juanita was founding director of Towson University’s MFA in Theatre in 1994, where she continues to teach, mentoring original student projects performed across the US and from Cairo to Warsaw. She has been a part of the Guest Artist cohort at Wilkes University’s MA/MFA in Creative Writing since its planning stages in 2004. She was also writer-in-residence and playwriting mentor for the O’Neill National Theatre Institute and Gallaudet University’s Visual Playwriting Conference.

In addition to her Fulbright in Costa Rica, Juanita’s international projects include work with the Center for International Theatre Development in various cities in Russia, Hungary, and Slovakia; research in Lodz, Poland, as a delegate for the Sister States Program; serving as U.S. representative to the ITI World Theatre Conference in Marseille, France; and directing at Teatro Municipão (São Paolo) and RS9 (Budapest).