Jeanette Sanchez-Izenman is a director, teaching artist, dramaturg, intimacy choreographer, stage manager and theatre theorist/historian. She did her actor training at the University of New Mexico where she earned her BFA with honors and returned to complete an MA in Directing and Educational Theatre under the mentorship of Susan Pearson.
She moved to the Pacific Northwest to study at the University of Washington School of Drama where she achieved her PhD candidacy in Theatre History and Criticism in 2006. While working toward her candidacy, she was a Drama School Intern at the Seattle Children’s Theatre (Class of 2004), where she remained working for several years in the box office and as a dramaturg/consultant for Jason and the Golden Fleece and Night of the Living Dead. She also worked with the marketing team to help promote Tomás and the Library Lady.
Jeanette highly values public scholarship and earned a fellowship at UW’s Simpson Center for the Public Humanities in 2005. She was in the inaugural cohort of the Project for Interdisciplinary Pedagogy at UW Bothell where she taught theatre and performance studies for nearly a decade. Her classes focused on social change (Latino Theatre for Social Change and Theatre for Young Audiences) and outreach (Education and the Performing Arts) where she partnered with local schools to bring theatre education into their classrooms via UWB students leading creative drama exercises. Her script analysis class, Project Hamlet, became an exploration of languages as she began working with larger numbers of international students and explored how to perform the play multilingually.
She is a co-founder of eSe Teatro in Seattle and has worked as a dramaturg with Teatro Vision in San Jose (Perla) and with Teatro Nuevo Mèxico (Electricidad). Her doomed dissertation was an exploration of women dressing as men in contemporary Latinx productions, most of which were reimagining classical works.
She works with Lakewood Playhouse as a stage manager and teaching artist. She won a “Woody” in 2017 for her work on The Rocky Horror Show.
She is a founder of Screaming Butterflies Productions with Kathryn Philbrook in Tacoma. Their indie company seeks to use performance to re-vision myth, community and justice through imaginative, tenacious, unapologetic creativity. She is working with Break the Table RPG, a local streaming group using fantasy and table top game mechanics to shape stories told by and for BIPOC to address some of the current issues we are dealing with. She also helped to found Rise Up: a South Sound BIPOC Theatre Artist Coalition.
She is currently serving as a commissioner on the Tacoma Arts Commission for District 1.
She is a deep believer in the power of collaboration in theatre, consent and inclusion.