TONI DORFMAN has directed six major productions for the Yale Baroque Opera Project: Cavalli’s Il Giasone (2009), Sacrati’s La finta pazza (2010), Cavalli’s Scipione Affricano (2010), Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (2012), Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (2014), and Cavalli’s La Didone (2017). She is grateful to colleagues Richard Lalli, Ellen Rosand, and Grant Herreid, who since 2009 have been her mentors and muses in YBOP.
What she loves about early Venetian opera in particular is not only the expressive beauty of the music and singing but also its evocation both of the lives of mortal humans and the realm of the gods – two worlds in the same space.
Since 1999 Dorfman has taught acting, directing, and playwriting full time at Yale, where she is a professor of theater studies (adjunct). She cofounded the annual Yale Playwrights Festival in 2003.
Other recent productions she has directed include Conor McPherson’s Shining City in St. Louis in 2016 and Brecht/Steffin’s Mother Courage at Yale in 2018 with a new score by Miles Walter ’18. Her own scripts, including Rounding Cassiopeia, Family Wolf, Third Wave Fems, One of the Damned Few (with Bud Thorpe), and The King of the Cimbri, have been developed and presented in New York, London, Santa Fe, Los Angeles, Chicago, and at Yale and the Long Wharf Theater. She holds a BA in philosophy, earned at Carleton College and the University of Iowa, and an MFA in theater directing from Columbia University.