Bio

Brian Mertes is a director whose body of work spans theater, televison and film. Mertes has directed the world premiere of many new plays, most recently David Greenspan’s The Myopia for the Foundry Theater at the Atlantic and Jose Rivera’s Massacre at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in NYC. He has developed new work at Ensemble Studio Theater, Manhattan Class Company, Soho Rep, Naked Angels, Manhattan Theater Club, The Public, PS 122, Actors Theater of Louisville, Playwrights Center Minneapolis, New Dramatists, Ars Nova, PlayPenn, and BACA.

With Julian Crouch, Mertes is the co-director of the new production of Jedermann by Hugo von Hofmannsthal in the Cathedral Square for the Salzburg Festival.  The production was also filmed and is airing on television and in cinemas across Austria and Germany.

Mertes regularly directs at Juilliard where he recently created a multimedia theater work based on Sam Shepard’s Paris, Texas with alt-country rocker, Jim White. He has taught directing for the Columbia and NYU film programs, and has been a guest director at North Carolina School of the Arts, SUNY Purchase, NYU Grad, UT Austin, and Yale.

Mertes has directed television for ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox, garnering three Emmy and three DGA nominations, and an Emmy for directing.

With director Melissa Kievman and producer Wendy vanden Heuvel, he helms an annual retreat at an old stone house in upstate New York, where, with their company, they have presented epic, environmental stagings of all of Chekhov’s plays with New York’s top actors and the collaboration of the local community.  This work recently led him to Industry City in Brooklyn, where he staged Lanford Wilson’s Balm In Gilead in collaboration with playwright Beau Willimon and director Alex Harvey.

He is currently Head of the MFA Directing Program at Brown University/Trinity Rep and Associate Director at Trinity where he directed Bruce Norris’ Clybourne Park, Curt Columbus and Marilyn Campbell’s adaptation of Crime and Punishment and Sam Shepard’s Lie of the Mind.