Cecilia Rubino is an award-winning writer, theater director, filmmaker, and educator based in New York City. She wrote and directed the documentary play Gage County NE with community members in Beatrice, Nebraska which is featured in each episode of HBO’s Mind Over Murder true-crime series directed by filmmaker Nanfu Wang (director: One Child Nation and Night is Not Eternal). HBO’s Mind Over Murder series, currently screening on MAX, has been nominated for multiple awards and the play Gage County NE is highlighted in numerous reviews including the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and American Theater Magazine.
VIDEO: TV NEWS ABOUT GAGE COUNTY NE
Cecilia Rubino directed the documentary film “Remembering Shakespeare” which explores new ways of thinking about memory and Shakespeare’s words in our digital age, where memory itself is at risk. The film currently screens on Vimeo on Demand. www.rememberingshakespearefilm.com
Her chapter “If It Lives In Your Memory” appears in The Whirlwind of Passion: New Critical Perspectives on William Shakespeare (Cambridge Scholars Press).
She recently directed the short whimsical film Menstrual Rosary with a score by Stefania de Kenessey which has won citations & awards at over thirty short film festivals worldwide including Hong Kong, London, Paris, and Milan; the Rotterdam Independent Film Festival; the San Francisco Indie Short Festival; the Madrid Arthouse Film Festival; the LGBTQ Unbordered Festival and the Dublin World Film Festival.
Rubino has created theater pieces which have performed at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater, The New Victory @ 42nd Street, Jefferson Market Playhouse, and the New York and Edinburgh Fringe Festivals. She wrote and directed FROM THE FIRE, which won three Edinburgh Fringe Festival’s UK/Music Theater Awards: Best Music, Best Production and Best New Musical and a WNET Public Television documentary of FROM THE FIRE was nominated for a NY Emmy award.
Working in an array of disciplines, Cecilia Rubino’s professional work and teaching have focused on five main areas: theater as essential community engagement; the “everyday practice of the actor”; re-imagining the classics (particularly Shakespeare); transformative arts education, and theater & climate advocacy. As an Associate Professor of Theater at Lang College, Rubino has directed the Lang College Theater program, named one of the top Civic Engagement and Social Justice theater programs in the US by American Theater Magazine. She currently coordinates the Lang College Arts in Context Program at The New School and the Lang Theater & Education Program in coordination with ‘I Have A Dream’-New York After School Programs. She received Lang College’s Faculty Advisor Excellence Award in 2016 and the New School’s Excellence in Teaching Award in 2018.
She is a member of the New Historia project whose mission is to reclaim the histories of women who have been erased but whose stories urgently need to be told again right now. .
For questions about Cecilia's work, or for collaboration inquiries, please send us a message.