Michael Hunter is an educator, theatre director, writer, and performance curator living in Los Angeles. He has a BA/MA in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and a Ph.D. in Drama from Stanford University, where he was also a postdoctoral fellow in the Humanities.
Michael has taught across numerous humanities fields at California College of the Arts, Otis (where he is a Senior Lecturer in the LAS Dept.), and UCLA (where he is a Lecturer in the LGBTQ+ Studies and Food Studies Programs). His teaching areas include Art History and Visual Criticism, Performance Making and History, Food Studies, and Critical Gender and Sexuality Studies.
In the Bay Area, Michael was a co-founding Artistic Director of Collected Works, a theatre and performance company that staged modern and contemporary work in non-traditional spaces. The company's work included productions of Jean Genet’s plays The Maids, performed in a church sanctuary, and The Balcony, performed in San Francisco’s historic Old Mint building, Witold Gombrowicz’s Princess Ivona in a warehouse space in SOMA, and a series of performances which brought to life the archive of the Museum of Performance + Design. From 2011-2020, Michael was the curator of the Franconia Performance Salon, a performance series dedicated to fostering experimental work-in-development by established and emerging performance artists. Currently, Michael is a member of AnomalousCo, an international collaborative company comprised of theatre artists producing web-based theatre; for AnomalousCo, Michael recently directed Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe and Words and Music for an online festival dedicated to Beckett’s late works and is currently a producing director for Caryl Churchill’s Love & Information, a work in development that incorporates over 50 theatre artists from more than a dozen countries.
In addition to his teaching and directing work, Michael also works as a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion consultant for corporations and non-profits.