Mary Hall Surface is a playwright, director, teaching artist and museum educator who specializes in theater for inter-generational audiences and multidisciplinary collaborations. Her plays have been produced at major professional theaters, museums, universities, and festivals throughout the US, Europe, Japan and Taiwan, including Arena Stage, the Folger Shakespeare Theatre, Round House Theatre, Word Dance Theatre, Seattle Children's Theatre, Tokyo's Theatre Seigei, Louisville's Stage One, the National Gallery of Art, the National Symphony Orchestra, and 17 productions at the Kennedy Center’s Theater for Young Audiences. She has been nominated for ten Helen Hayes Awards (receiving the award in 2002 for Outstanding Director of a Musical), and has published twelve plays, two books of...
Mary Hall Surface is a playwright, director, teaching artist and museum educator who specializes in theater for inter-generational audiences and multidisciplinary collaborations. Her plays have been produced at major professional theaters, museums, universities, and festivals throughout the US, Europe, Japan and Taiwan, including Arena Stage, the Folger Shakespeare Theatre, Round House Theatre, Word Dance Theatre, Seattle Children's Theatre, Tokyo's Theatre Seigei, Louisville's Stage One, the National Gallery of Art, the National Symphony Orchestra, and 17 productions at the Kennedy Center’s Theater for Young Audiences. She has been nominated for ten Helen Hayes Awards (receiving the award in 2002 for Outstanding Director of a Musical), and has published twelve plays, two books of monologues for middle school students, and three award-winning original cast albums of her musicals with composer David Maddox, "Sing Down the Moon: Appalachian Wonder Tales," "Perseus Bayou," and "The Odyssey of Telemaca." She is the recipient of the Charlotte Chorpenning Prize from the American Alliance for Theatre and Education for her outstanding body of work as a playwright and the life-time achievement 2022 Medallion Award from the Children's Theater Foundation of America. Ms Surface is the Founding Artistic Director of the INTERSECTIONS Festival at DC’s Atlas Performing Arts Center where she has programmed over 400 multi-disciplinary performances and championed innovative community engagement. Her popular creative writing inspired by art series, "Write into Art," is presented quarterly by the Smithsonian Associates. She was on the faculty of Harvard University's Project Zero Classroom from 2014- 2019, on the national roster of Kennedy Center teaching artists from 1985 - 2024, and a Writer in Residence at Chautauqua Institution in 2025.