Massoud Saidpour, Director, Performing Arts, Music, and Film
Massoud Saidpour directs the museum's year-round performing arts, music, and film series. During his tenure, he instituted the Division of Performing Arts, Music, and Film and conceived the VIVA! Festival of Performing Arts and Carnevale World Music and Dance Series. In this capacity he has presented and produced some of the finest performing artists from over 40 countries around the world. His programming, often playing to sold-out houses, has been acclaimed as "one of the most successful and creative art programs in the region." (
The Plain Dealer).
He has been a panelist for national and regional arts agencies including the National Endowment for the Arts, Arts International, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He represents the museum on the Jazz on the Circle collaboration between the museum, The Cleveland Orchestra, Northeast Ohio Jazz Society, and Tri-C College, as well as at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters.
He received his degree in Theatre Arts from the University of California, Irvine, where, in addition to completing his theatre studies with honors, he studied with Polish theater master Jerzy Grotowski. During his 8 years with Grotowski he studied acting and directing with him and worked with his associates: performing artists from various world cultures including Bali, Korea, Haiti, Columbia, Turkey, Poland, and the U.S. He furthered his theatre studies at UCLA and San Francisco State University graduate programs. In 1991 he joined the New World Performance Laboratory in Akron, Ohio, as an actor and director, and finished his graduate course work and received his Master’s Degree from the University of Akron.
His critically acclaimed
Persian Cycles, a series of performances based on Persian classical literature and performance idioms, was the subject of an in-depth study by the
New Theatre Quarterly (Cambridge University Press), and was featured in
The Drama Review (MIT Press). Other directorial highlights include,
Phantoms of King Lear (adapted from Shakespeare's
King Lear), for which he received an Editor's Choice award from the American Theatre magazine,
He and She (based on Anton Chekhov's one act plays and short stories);
Come and See! (adapted from Goethe's
Faust);
The Chairs by Eugene Ionesco;
Swan Song + Confessions (based on Anton Chekhov’s one act play
Swan Song and Nikolai Gogol’s
Diaries of a Madman. He is a contributing author to
Grotowski's Objective Drama Research (University Press of Mississippi).
Between 1999 and 2004 he conducted a series of theatre workshops and residencies for Brazilian actors and directors in Rio de Janeiro, Recife, and Belo Horizonte.