School Notes: David Geffen School of Drama
March/April 2026

Chair of directing to step down

Liz Diamond, who joined the directing program faculty in 1992 and has served as its chair since 2002, will step down from full-time teaching at David Geffen School of Drama at the end of this academic year. Liz will continue teaching half-time for the next two years before fully retiring in 2028. 

“Liz’s wide-ranging skill set, ethical sensibility, and buoyant good humor have empowered her students to read dramatic texts with clarity and in detail; find and expand the range of their directorial voices; and take responsibility for leading collaborative work with attention to the Geffen School’s values,” said Dean James Bundy ’95MFA. “She did the latter long before the school had formally expressed those values—I know this because I myself was her student, and the foundations of my personal directing practice were laid in classes I took with her more than 30 years ago.” 

Diamond’s career as a director includes nearly 50 professional productions Off-Broadway and at theaters across the country, including world premieres of plays by Marcus Gardley ’04MFA (faculty), Suzan-Lori Parks, and Octavio Solis, among many others. She is the recipient of an Obie Award for her production of Parks’s Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, and a Connecticut Critics Circle Award for her direction of Yale Rep’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s St. Joan of the Stockyards. Her production of Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros this spring marks her 20th production at Yale Rep. 

James Bundy added, “To have a colleague of such intellectual prowess, theatrical imagination, and personal warmth has been one of the great joys of my own tenure at the school. No one works harder to meet people where they are, or to wrap their artistic and critical discourse in the most kind and open-minded possible framework. To me, Liz embodies the best qualities of our community, not least in her ability to manage and promote positive change—she will leave to the next generation of leaders a directing program second to none, for which we must all be grateful.”