Jennifer Little is a theatrical director, activist and educator. She has been involved in theatre her entire life.
sngrlittle1011@gmail.com
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Jennifer Little as Carlotta in Phantom of the Opera
Jennifer Little, currently directing, producing and teaching in Michigan, Oakland Community College, and elsewhere.
Jennifer Little spent over fifteen years as a professional actress, performing on Broadway with such luminaries as Harold Prince and in film (with Ron Howard and Penny Marshall) and television. Her credits include The Phantom of the Opera, Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods, Mame, As The World Goes Round and others. She holds a B.A from SJSU in Performance and a M.A. from CUNY in Applied Theatre.
In 2005, she began teaching fulltime, working on bringing applied theatre to standard curriculum programs within public schools in the U.S. and integrating Arts with Social Studies and English. She moved into directing and directed multiple musicals, straight plays and original devised works. Her directing has been seen in New York, Edinburgh, Wales, New Jersey and Michigan. She has worked with both equity performers and non-professionals alike and has a reputation for building co-intentionality into all of her projects, wherein the actors and she work together to create new experiences and lenses through which the work is viewed.
In 2016, she created a partnership with Arc Mercer in New Jersey and Kirk Ponton, collaborating on both original devised works and scripted musicals, bringing adults with disabilities into partnership with college students as part of large scaled productions. Since arriving at Oakland Community College, she has collaborated with OCC’s outstanding American Sign Language program, integrating student shadow interpreters into all of the theatrical productions. The interpreters and actors work together from the beginning of the rehearsal process to tell stories in a more inclusive manner for our communities.
In the past, she presented at NYU’s conference on Applied Theatre and Citizenship, EdTA National Conference, Human Rights in Global Perspective Conference, AATE National Conference, and National Drama Conference in Wales and worked with the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards (NCCAS) writing the new national standards for theatre.
She traveled to Bangladesh courtesy of an Association of Performers and Presenters (APAP) grant in order to study Bangladeshi theatre and present workshops on American theatre at the University of Dhaka and Bangladesh Institute of Theatre Arts. While there, she worked with BITA (Bangladesh Institute Theatre of Arts) focusing on theatre in education and environmental and social issues in the Hill Tracts Region. In addition, her studies from that trip were published in Bangla in Chittagong, Bangladesh in 2015.
2020 and Covid found Jennifer creating online productions, along with original, devised podcasts. She also directed a live show, fully masked, with a small, masked audience. Her discoveries during the pandemic allowed her to explore new ways of storytelling and devising around a global event that both united and divided the world.
She helped found SOS Theatre Company and with that company, created several critically acclaimed, award-winning original dramas. She has won multiple awards including the 2014 New Jersey State Jefferson Youth Project 360 Honoree for Peace and Justice. She is currently the Theatre Director and Full-Time Instructor at Oakland Community College and continues to work in applied theatre with communities across the world.
Currently, she is working with a colleague in Vermont on an original piece exploring immigration, after spending two years visiting incarcerating undocumented citizens in New Jersey and documenting their stories. With theatre’s resurgence, she is back to a full-time directing and teaching schedule in Michigan and elsewhere. The coming seasons will include musicals, dramas, and an operetta, along with returning to some overseas projects.
In 2023, Jennifer won the NISOD Excellence in Teaching Award, as well as her own college’s Excellence in Teaching recognition. In Fall of 2024, she will be directing Neil Berg’s US premiere of Charlie Hu$tle.