SkyPilot Theatre Company is pleased to announce they have hired James Carey as their new Artistic Director. Shelby Janes, Board President and the SkyPilot Board announced today that after an exhaustive search for a new Artistic Director that they are very excited to have Mr. Carey on board as Artistic Director and look forward to an amazing 2018 season.
James Carey, former Co-founder and Producing Artistic Director of the LA based Attic Theatre Ensemble, has been a mainstay on the LA small theatre scene since 1983 with his first production at the Fountain Theatre, Chekov For Free, which won 3 Drama-Logue Awards. He went on to found the Attic Theatre Ensemble in Santa Monica in 1987 with his partner, Denise Ragan Wiesenmeyer. While there, he co-founded the Hollywood Theatre Row with Matt Chait in 1994, and served as its first president for which he won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award and a Hollywood Arts Council “Charlie” Award. In 2000, he moved the Attic Theatre operation to Washington Blvd to join the growing Culver City arts scene. He ran the day to day operation of the Attic until 2012 when he stepped down to focus on more personal projects.
Since 2012, he worked overseas as an arts consultant with NGO’s in Zimbabwe, Malawi, and South Africa, taught theatre workshops in Africa and Italy, directed and produced two shows for the National Theatre of Zimbabwe, and toured two one-man shows around the USA. He also accepted a full-time teaching position at New York Film Academy’s Los Angeles campus 2015 till 2018. He sold the Attic operation to Chomolume Theatre in 2017.
“I am very happy to be at SkyPilot,“ Carey said. “Half my career as a theatre/film director and producer has been working on original material and that is what SkyPilot does. We produce original plays written by LA based playwrights. It is our niche, our identity. I had been out of the LA theatre scene for about five years. When they offered me the job, I was a little scared. Things have changed so much in that time. But the opportunity to work with original plays was too good to pass up. Plus the Board of Directors here is great. I get to be an Artistic Director and that is all. It is the perfect job situation.”
Carey’s resume includes over 100 plays and short films directed, over 400 plays produced, university teaching stops at AMDA, NYFA, Peppedine, California Lutheran and CSU-Long Beach, and overseas consulting/teaching work.
“Yes, the last five years have been extremely rewarding. Traveling around the world, living and teaching in places I never thought I would ever see, working with all kinds of artists. Very exciting, but a lot of time on planes and in airports. It can be very tiring, so it is nice to be in one place for a while. SkyPilot is the perfect place right now.”