Introducing our Artistic Director - Michelle-Louise Wright
An Experienced Educator
Michelle-Louise qualified as a Teacher of English and Drama in 2004 and has been teaching Shakespeare in both text and dramatic form since then.
She has taught Shakespeare to inner-city London boys and Leicester EAL students, to pupils from rural schools in the East Midlands and a PRU in Croydon, to children at a prep school in the Home Counties and to all male footballers retaking GCSEs at an FE College. She has also led groups of Refugee Children and Adult Learners through GCSE and other English qualifications.
Her broad experience means she can quickly and confidently relate the content of what we do to any engagement group and can call on a wide array of people management skills to keep things productive and fun!
Shakespeare's Globe & The RSC
Michelle has trained in active approaches to teaching Shakespeare by The Globe and The Royal Shakespeare Company Education. She has also been trained in Playing Shakespeare by The Royal Shakespeare Company.
Actor & Director
A career in London theatre that included Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, and Fluellan in Henry V (among other non-Shakespearean roles such as Bolla in Jez Butterworth's Night Heron) was brought to an end by her move to Nottingham where opportunities to play Shakespeare were less available.
Michelle decided that if the opportunities weren't there it was time to make them! She founded the Nottingham Shakespeare Company in 2019 with the mission to bring quality Shakespeare to everyone. She has since directed A Midsummer Night;s Dream, Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors for NSC.
"I spent years as an educator, hearing parents and children say that Shakespeare is 'boring', 'rubbish', 'nothing to do with me', before we even started the lessons! But then seeing what an active, drama based approach to Shakespeare can do for students in terms of confidence, empowerment and sheer joy makes all the hard work worth it. It's all got to start with the live experience so that's what the company does."