Christopher Ashley

After completing The Drama League's director's training program in 1987, Christopher Ashley served as assistant to Evan Yionoulis on Richard Greenberg's one-act "The Author's Voice" which was presented as part of Marathon '87 at the Ensemble Theatre Studio. He graduated to full-fledged stager with the 1989 Off-Broadway play "The Night Hank Williams Died" and then garnered notice directing Anna Deavere Smith in her one-person, multi-character drama "Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities" at the New York Shakespeare Festival's Public Theater. Ashley hit his stride in 1993 teaming with comic writer Paul Rudnick on "Jeffrey," a timely examination of homosexual love in the era of AIDS which proved to be an Off-Broadway hit, and staging Claudia Shear's acclaimed autobiographical one-woman show "Blown Sideways Through Life." (Two years later, he would segue to other media recreating his efforts with the feature version of the former and the PBS television adaptation of the latter.)