Jenny McConnell Frederick is the co-Artistic Director of Rorschach Theatre. She founded the company in the summer of 1999 with Randy Baker. She is a DC-based a director, producer and theatre maker with a strong belief in impossible theatre. She’s a mom.
Currently she is part of team building Rorschach’s ground-breaking Psychogeographies Projects for which she created the concept. The immersive experience sends participants to seven locations around Washington, DC to explore chapters in an unfolding story about DC history–real and imagined and ends in a live in-person production. For Rorschach, she has directed the Helen Hayes Nominated Voices Underwater and God of Vengeance, as well as sold out runs of Master & Margarita and Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere as well as many others.. She conceived and directed Truth & Beauty Bombs, an original work based on the Canadian webcomic A Softer World.
She has also directed for Theater J (G-d’s Honest Truth) and Catholic University (Sissy and Fifi & Hunter Forever!). She co-created March!: The Women’s Movement from Isadora Duncan to Now, and Chambers of the Heart, both immersive Dance/Theatre projects at Word Dance Theatre. She’s served as a mentor director for the Theatre Lab’s Honors Acting Conservatory and for the Kennedy Center’s American College Theatre Festival and was a featured speaker at the CityWrights Conference in Miami. During her tenure as Director of Artistic Programs at CulturalDC, she served as Artistic Director of Source Festival. In that capacity she oversaw the selection, development and production of more than 200 works for the stage over nearly a decade. Work developed and produced by Jenny at the Source Festival boasts multiple National New Play Network Rolling World Premieres, several American Theatre Critics Association Steinberg Award Nominations and an Osborn Award Winner. Through CulturalDC’s Mead Theatre Lab Program and Space4: Performing Arts (which she conceived of and launched in 2017), she directed artist selection and recruitment processes and oversaw advisory panels. She has worked closely with many artists to create, develop and produce their own work.
She lives in Takoma, DC with her husband and their long-term collaboration, a son named Thane.
