LILEANA BLAIN-CRUZ is a director from New York City and Miami. She is the recipient of the Drama League’s 2022 Founders Award for Excellence in Directing, and is currently the resident director of Lincoln Center Theater. Lileana was named a 2021 Doris Duke Artist, a 2020 Lincoln Center Emerging Artist, and a 2018 United States Artists Fellow. Recent projects include: The Skin of Our Teeth (Lincoln Center, Tony nomination); Stranger Love (LA Philharmonic); Create Dangerously (Miami New Drama); The Listeners (Opera Norway, a new opera by Missy Mazzoli); White Girl in Danger (Second Stage / Vineyard Theatre); Dreaming Zenzile (St. Louis Rep, McCarter Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop / National Black Theatre); Marys Seacole (LCT3, Obie Award); Wayne Shorter and esperanza spalding’s …(Iphigenia) (MASS MoCA, Arts Emerson, The Kennedy Center); Hansel and Gretel (an opera film for Houston Grand Opera); Afrofemononomy (PSNY); Anatomy of a Suicide (Atlantic Theater Company); Fefu and Her Friends (TFANA); Girls (Yale Rep.); Faust (Opera Omaha); Fabulation, Or the Reeducation of Undine (Signature Theatre); Thunderbodies and Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. (Soho Rep.); The House That Will Not Stand and Red Speedo (NYTW); Water by the Spoonful (Mark Taper Forum/CTG); Pipeline (Lincoln Center); The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (Signature Theatre, Obie Award); Henry IV, Part One and Much Ado AboutNothing (Oregon Shakespeare Festival); The Bluest Eye (The Guthrie); War (LCT3/Lincoln Center Theater and Yale Rep.); Salome (JACK); Hollow Roots (the Under the Radar Festival at The Public Theater). She received her BA from Princeton and her MFA in directing from the Yale School of Drama, where she received both the Julian Milton Kaufman Memorial Prize and the Pierre-Andre Salim Prize for her leadership and directing.

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