Jonathan Pitts
Jonathan Pitts is the Executive Director of the Chicago Improv Festival Productions. He is also the Co-Founder of the prestigious Chicago Improv Festival. This is his 14th year producing the festival. He's been involved in improvisational theatre for over 30 years.
He is also the creator/producer of the CIF's All-State Improv Team; College Improv Tournament; Ridge Park Summer Theatre Camp; and Teen Comedy Fest, as well as CIF Production's touring educational outreach programs, The Make 'Em Ups; Storybox For Kids; Viola Spolin - Visionary Woman of Play; and World Tales.
He has improvised in over 1,100 shows with numerous ensembles in Chicago and across America, in everything from games to long-forms, and from scenes to experimental work. He was a member of Improv Olympic's first ever house team, Stone Soup. As an actor, he's appeared in over 30 plays and performance pieces with several Chicago area theatre companies. He's also a former company member of The Blue Rider Theater.
Additionally, he's also the creator/director of several theatre productions, as well as the improvisation theatre forms: The Oracle; The Silent Movie; and Storybox Theatre; as well as The Marty, a teaching exercise that he utilizes in his Whole Body Listening workshop.
As an improv teacher, for the past 13 years he's been a guest artist at The Second City Training Center and he's also a 3 year faculty member at Piven Theatre Workshop. Nationally, he's taught in Albuquerque, Atlanta, Champaign, Chapel Hill, Honolulu, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Internationally, he's taught in London for The Spontaneity Shop; and in Norway for Norsk Sceneskrekk.
For 7 years, he was the theatre/performance art curator of the Around the Coyote. For 3 years he produced the Director's Festival for Bailiwick Theatre. While there, he also produced Naked I, a Chicago visual performance arts fest, and Art Attack, an arts festival in Michigan. Currently, he's an Advisory Board Member of Director's Lab Chicago and the Windy City Burlesque Festival. He's also currently an Artistic Associate of Philadelphia's Duo Fest and Austin's Out of Bounds Comedy Festival. He's a former Artistic Associate of Bailiwick Theatre and WNEP Theater.
He's interviewed in three documentary films about improvisation: The Compass – America's First Improv Theatre; The Delmonic Interviews; and Improv Legends. He's a contributing writer to Anne Libera's book, The Second City's Almanac of Improvisation. He also wrote the forward to Asaf Ronan's book On Directing Improv, and he was profiled in Tom Salinsky's & Deborah Frances-White's book The Improv Handbook, which was published in England and Europe. For 3 consecutive years he was selected by New City magazine as one of "Chicago's Top 50 Theatre Players".