Elizabeth McKoy is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, theater director, choreographer, dancer, and visual artist whose work spans more than 25 years. She is the Founding Artistic Director of Berkeley Playhouse, which she founded in 2008, and Director of Artaluma, a nonprofit creativity center in Petaluma, California.
Elizabeth has directed more than 50 stage productions and commissioned eight new musicals and theatrical works, including the critically acclaimed Antigone: 1989 — A Town Hall Musical, presented at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2026.
Elizabeth’s decades of teaching theater, dance, and visual arts have included helping to launch the Bay Area affiliate of Lincoln Center Institute for Arts Education and developing programs and workshops for organizations including SFMOMA, San Francisco Opera, and California Shakespeare Theater. Today at Artaluma, she teaches Dance Jam, GROOVE, and visual art classes, continuing her lifelong work of bringing people together through the arts.
Elizabeth uses music, movement, visual storytelling, and ensemble collaboration to explore how people find their voices within families, communities, and systems of power.
Whether reimagining a classic, developing a new musical, or building an arts organization, she approaches theatre as an act of connection—rigorous in craft, expansive in possibility, and rooted in the belief that audiences can leave seeing one another differently.
Elizabeth directs and produces this new one-act musical, developed from her concept, which relocates Sophocles’ tragedy to Thebes, California in 1989 and brings audiences into a town hall within a Theban temple, exploring grief, LGBTQ+ activism, civic ritual, and the cost of silence.
Elizabeth returns to Berkeley Playhouse to direct the MainStage production of David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori’s big-hearted musical adaptation.
2007
8
2,000+
35,000+
A growing gallery of productions Elizabeth has directed, including work at Berkeley Playhouse.
“Bringing music and theatre to life.”
Elizabeth’s work connects artists, audiences, students, and communities—whether she is shaping a new musical, directing a mainstage production, or teaching the next generation of theatre makers.
