Elise Dewsberry

Most recent performances: Mother’s Mothers’ Day (2019 Hollywood Fringe); Singing Sixty (a one-woman birthday celebration at Rockwell Table & Stage); Domina in Forum at Cabrillo Music Theatre, Forks in the Road (NMI’s 2015 Fifteen Minute Musicals); Aline Barnsdall in Frogs in the Living Room; Mary Marie; The Angel of Painted Post; Now and Then a Hero at the 2011 Stages Festival; Red v. Blue (NMI’s 2008 Fifteen Minute Musicals); Spellcasters at the Secret Rose; and Queen Mab’s Alarmingly Mandatory Bridal Shower at the Noho Arts Center.

Most recent directing: Bravo; Spellbound (2017 Stages Festival); Invisible at the Colony and 3-D Theatricals; City of Light at the Colony Theatre; Bloodline and Mad Bomber (for the 2013 Stages Festival); Mary Marie; Love Bytes; NMI’s 2006, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2016, 2018, and 2019 Fifteen Minute Musicals; At Home In Mitford; and The Water.

While living in Toronto, Elise served as the Assistant Artistic Director of the Muskoka Festival; the Co-Ordinator of the festival’s annual Musical Theatre Writer’s Colony, the Associate Dramaturge of the Canadian Stage Company; the Resident Dramaturge of the Smile Theatre Company; and was the co-founder of Toronto’s Script Lab. Elise spent many years touring Canada with Nine Months – a one-woman musical which she commissioned from writers Carl Ritchie and Stephen Woodjetts. Elise and Carl also co-wrote Any Body Home?, which was produced by the Cordova Bay Theatre in Victoria, British Columbia, and published by Dramatic Publishing.

Elise joined the Academy for New Musical Theatre (the former name of New Musicals Inc.) as Associate Artistic Director in 2003; joined Founding Artistic Director John Sparks as Co-Artistic Director in 2010; and became Artistic Director of New Musicals Inc. in 2013. Elise also serves as a Los Angeles Ovation Award Voter, and is the author and evaluator of the Book Lab and the Outlining Lab, offered online through www.writingmusicaltheatre.com

Elise has been ecstatically married to cellist Stephen Green for 36 years, and they are the proud parents of community organizer Rebecca Rose.