After more than 30 years at Imagination Stage, founding artistic director Janet Stanford announced that she will depart the youth arts powerhouse in the summer of 2024.
Stanford, along with founder Bonnie Fogel, was instrumental in transforming the small performing arts program into a nationally-prominent regional theater and leader in positive youth development through the performing arts for children ages 1 to 21.
After Fogel retired in 2020, Stanford successfully led Imagination Stage out of the pandemic and, beginning in April 2022, has partnered with managing director Jason Najjoum to plan for a sustainable future for the organization at a perilous time for performing arts organizations. Thanks to the diversified and extensive programming throughout the DMV that she has championed, Stanford leaves Imagination Stage in the strongest financial position of its 43-year history.
In a letter to friends and colleagues, Stanford expressed gratitude to the hundreds of dedicated and talented colleagues, staff, board members, fellow artists, and supporters that she has had the opportunity to work with. “A commitment to youth is the North Star that draws us all,” she wrote. “Together, we have done much in four decades to bring the arts to more than a million young people and to nurture them with the ‘slow food’ that only live theater can provide.”
Since joining the company in 1993, Stanford has produced 160 shows, directed 55, written nine, commissioned 50 new works and introduced innovative educational programs that prioritize social justice and finding a young person’s unique identity or voice through theater arts. She has long been a leader in promoting equity, diversity and inclusion by establishing the Youth Speaks to Age Series in the 1990s that brought a dozen new scripts by BIPOC playwrights to the field, by featuring deaf actors and actors with physical and cognitive disabilities in nine mainstage productions, and by casting diverse actors in everything so that all children see themselves in the stories on stage.
The Imagination Stage board of trustees will form a committee to conduct a national search for Stanford’s successor.
Stanford’s extraordinary contributions to Imagination Stage will be honored, along with those of other women who made Imagination Stage, at the organization’s Annual Gala on March 2, 2024, at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. For more information and to support this event, email [email protected].
