Associate Professor of Theatre
Director of Theatre Peter Friedrich rejoins Berry after returning from Finland as a 2021 Seeking Solutions to Global Challenges Fulbright Scholar. While there in May, he led an original theatre collaboration between students and asylum seekers from Ukraine and Afghanistan, winning two awards at the 2022 FinnFringe International Theatre Festival. His collaborators in similar original works include The Goodman Theatre and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In 2020, he won a Top 100 Teachers Award from the Ellen DeGeneres Show for innovation during the pandemic. An actor for many years, he most recently played the titular role in the 2019 Off-Broadway revival of The Curious Case of the Watson Intelligence by Madeline George.
In 2013 he was given the Contribution to the Field Award by the American Conservatory Theatre for his five years of directing work in Northern Iraq, and for the past 7 seven years has devised productions in underserved communities in the U.S. and overseas, including the United States Penitentiary in Yazoo City, Mississippi while Director of Theatre at Millsaps College.
He was a Scholar-in-Residence at the University of North Carolina Chapel-Hill, and has held fellowships at Kenyon College and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. He is one of three recipients of the new Seeking Solutions to Global Challenges Fulbright Award, and in late 2021 will travel to Turku, Finland on a project using theatre to connect students at Åbo Akademi University with migrant communities.