Anita Maynard-Losh

Anita Maynard-Losh is the director of community engagement and senior artistic advisor at Arena Stage, where she leads the theater’s education and outreach programs and serves on the artistic team. Now in her 18th season at Arena Stage, Anita has been involved in an artistic capacity on 45 Arena Stage productions: she directed the world premiere of Our War as part of the National Civil War Project and has been an associate director, text director, and vocal/dialect coach on multiple other productions. Anita trained and taught at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, was on the faculty at Webster University in St. Louis, headed the theater department at the University of Alaska Southeast, and was the associate artistic director of Perseverance Theater in Juneau, Alaska, where she directed 21 mainstage productions. Anita traveled extensively with the artist-in-schools program in Alaska, working primarily with indigenous populations within the context of traditional villages. The Alaska Native-inspired production of Macbeth that Anita conceived and directed was performed in English and Tlingit at the National Museum of the American Indian as part of the Shakespeare in Washington Festival. Her essay about the project was published in Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance, Palgrave MacMillan. She has coached dialects for the Kennedy Center, the Washington National Opera, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Portland Center Stage, and the Broadway revival of Ragtime. Anita has traveled with Arena Stage’s devised theater program, Voices of Now, to India (2012, 2014), Croatia (2015, 2019), and Bosnia and Herzegovina (2019) to collaborate with communities in devising original plays addressing social justice issues.