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• Leader of the Arts

Brenda Bynum

**November 2005*

Actor, Director, Educator

Brenda Bynum has an extensive resume as a theater performer, teacher, and arts advocate. She has acted and directed professionally since 1962 and has appeared on the stages of the Alliance Theater, as well as most other professional theaters in Atlanta, in a number of roles over the last 25 years. Most recently, she was named “Best Actress” in 2004 by the AJC for her performance in Sandra Deer’s “The Subject Tonight is Love”, directed by Kenny Leon.

From 1984 to 1998, she served as the Acting Teacher for the Alliance’s Professional Intern Program which drew talented young artists from all over the country and whose graduates include many of Atlanta’s finest actors, directors and theater entrepreneurs.

Brenda was on the faculty of the Department of Theater Studies at Emory University and a resident Actor/Director at Theater Emory for 17 years until her retirement in 2000. While there, as a specialist in the performance of works by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, Brenda realized a dream by overseeing the completion of a long-term project to mount professional productions of Beckett’s entire dramatic canon in Atlanta (a distinction shared by a few other cities in the world), and was invited to appear at the International Beckett Festival in The Hague.

She has also served as special guest artist in residence for the theater department of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, directing, acting in and lecturing on Beckett’s work.

She was founding artistic director with her husband Cary of The Southern Poets Theatre whose most well known production has been the perennial favorite “Cabbagetown: 3 Women”, the story of three Cabbagetown women who came from the North Georgia Mountains to work in the Fulton Cotton Mill. The play became a local cult classic after its premiere in 1978 and Brenda garnered an Emmy nomination for the production when it was filmed for public television.

Brenda was also one of the founding directors of the critically acclaimed Callanwolde Theater- the first professional theater in Atlanta run entirely by women. She has developed eleven original plays and performance pieces based on the lives of real women and currently tours in a solo show, “Notional Women”, which is dedicated exclusively to fund-raising for worthy causes.

In 1980, she was elected as the first president of the seminal Atlanta New Play Project, an organization which crossed lines and brought together theater artists from every segment of the city’s population, working toward the common goal of encouraging and producing new work, the achievement of which is evident in the vital and generative theater community we all enjoy today.

Brenda is currently involved in planning for the International Year of Beckett 2006, curating a photo exhibit of the history of Beckett production in Atlanta, and directing a production of “Not I” for PushPush Theater- both of which will open in January 2006 as part of a yearlong celebration of Beckett’s 100th birthday.

Brenda fell in love with the theater while earning a bachelor’s degree in drama from Mercer University. Brenda and her husband Cary live in Druid Hills, have two grown sons and a brand-new grandson and travel the world whenever possible.