Aubrey Mellor OAM is a revered, multi-award-winning, artistic director, writer, actor, theatre director, and arts educator. He mentored our Artistic Director, Christine Logan, in Endangered Productions' major show Peer Gynt.
Aubrey has spent a lifetime in the arts – including opera, dance, theatre, and film. We were delighted to have him work with our Company!
Read an interview with Aubrey here.
Aubrey Mellor OAM is a leading Australian Theatre Director, Dramaturge and Teacher, with expertise in Asian Theatre, new work and classics – especially Chekhov, Shakespeare and Brecht.
Currently, Senior Fellow at LASALLE, he was formerly Dean of Performing Arts at Lasalle; and, prior to that, Director of the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) with associations with arts training at Victorian College of the Arts and Queensland University of Technology.
Ex Artistic Director of four important theatre companies across Australia, he has directed a range of genres from opera, dance and film. He is well known as an acting teacher to a generation of acclaimed Australian actors, and renowned for translations and productions of the classics, as well as for development of new work. He has directed for all major companies, commissioned and premiered plays by Australia’s leading playwrights and is a leading proponent of new Australian writing.
He was brought up in Variety and Circus, trained as a dancer, visual artist and musician and graduated from the NIDA Production Course in 1969. In 1972 he was awarded a Churchill Fellowship and was the first Australian to study Asian theatre, from Japan to India. He first joined NIDA’s staff in 1970 as resident director and later as acting tutor, remaining with the school until 1979.
He was Artistic Director of the Jane Street Theatre (Sydney) seasons 1978-9 and was Co-Artistic Director of Nimrod Theatre Company (Sydney) 1980-84. 1985-87, he returned to NIDA as Deputy Director. Between 1988 and 1993 he was Artistic Director of the (Royal) Queensland Theatre Company and became Artistic Director of Playbox-Malthouse in Melbourne from 1993 -2004. Director of NIDA from 2004 to 2008 then Dean of Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore, then Senior Fellow.
Aubrey has directed hundreds of productions in all states of Australia and produced work for most major Arts Festivals in Australia and Asia.
He founded several writing awards: the Camalco Young Playwrights’ Awards; the George Landen Dann Playwright’s Award (now the Premier’s Literary Award); The Playbox-Asialink Award for best play on an Asian theme; the Malcolm Robertson Award for best play by a new writer.
He worked as guest director and teacher in the United Kingdom, USA, and several Asian countries. He is a committee member of Performance 4A, creating work for Asian Australians, member of the NIDA Board of Studies and visiting professor at other training schools including Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), University of Southern Queensland (USQ), Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Toho Gakuen Japan, and MyPhat Training Centre Vietnam, Central Academy Beijing, Shanghai Theatre Academy and Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts; and has served as director, member and advisor to numerous arts bodies including the Performing Arts Board of The Australia Council and The Australian National Playwright’s Conference.
Aubrey was a founding member of several international and regional bodies, initiating several international theatre schools associations, including UNESCO ITI’s Asia-Pacific Bureau of theatre schools (APB); The Mexican and Central American Bureau; the Asia Theatre Education Centre (ATEC, based in Beijing); the Global Alliance of Theatre Schools (GATS); the International University Theatre Association (IUTA); and UNITWIN (UNESCO Network for Higher Education in the Performing Arts) and the Asian League of Institutes of Arts (ALIA) as well as International Humour Studies’ subgroup, Humor of the Past (HOP).
He is also an international teacher and dramaturge advising playwrights in several countries and an active member of the International Humour Studies Association where he contributed entries to the two-volume International Encyclopedia of Humour.
He was awarded the Order of Australia Medal in 1992 for services to the arts and the community. His many other awards include the Australian Writer’s Guild’s Dorothy Crawford Award for services to Playwriting and the International Theatre Institute’s Uchimura Prize for best production, Tokyo International Festival.
Now retired, he remains active as a guest artist/teacher to many countries of the world.