Arizona Theatre Matters announces new Co-Artistic Director and Exciting Upcoming Projects

from our friends at Arizona Theatre Matters:

Pamela Sterling

Arizona Theatre Matters (formerly Universal Access Productions) is thrilled to announce their new co-artistic director, Pamela Sterling.

Sterling is an associate professor of theatre at Arizona State University. She holds a BFA from the Professional Actor Training Program and an MFA in Child Drama from the University of Washington in Seattle. As Artistic Director she has been at the helm of such theatres as The Muny/Student Theatre Project in St. Louis, The Coterie in Kansas City Missouri, Honolulu Theatre for Youth and Idaho Theatre for Youth. As a freelance director her work includes The Grapes of Wrath for the Fulton Theatre in Lancaster, PA, All My Sons and Talley’s Folly for Profile Theatre in Portland, Oregon, The Diary of Anne Frank for Northwest Children’s Theatre, To Kill a Mockingbird for Theatre Project Company in St. Louis, and many others.

Founding Artistic Director, Jeanmarie (Simpson) Bishop said, "I could not be more excited about a new collaborative partner. Pamela directed a staged reading of my play, The Joy, earlier this year. I was deeply impressed by her masterful staging and sensitivity to the material. In subsequent months, I have come to appreciate the breadth of Pamela's experience, her interest in inclusion and her virtuosic approach to theatre as an art form and as a powerful agent for social change."

In the coming year, Arizona Theatre Matters will present a festival of solo works, an all-female production of Inherit the Wind, myriad readings, workshops and more.

"We're just refreshing our website and getting our Facebook page started," Simpson added, "so we hope artists and audiences will stay tuned for many exciting developments as the season unfolds."

About Arizona Theatre Matters: The diversity of people — including those with and without disabilities — necessitates a universal access approach. Arizona Theatre Matters creates theatre, film and stage-to-film accessible to everyone, regardless of physical ability. We empower people with and without disabilities, those under-represented in mainstream theatre, as artists and patrons within a system from which they have been traditionally excluded.