Stephanie Carll is a director, producer, theatre-maker, and teaching artist with over thirty years of experience making theatre in unconventional places — rooftops, farms, near-darkness, and the occasional feast.

As Co-Founder and Producing Artistic Director of Present Company, she has spent fifteen years creating immersive, site-specific work that asks audiences to show up not as spectators but as participants — and has drawn thousands of them annually to large-scale public Shakespeare productions that are free, alive, and reliably sold out.

The curiosity and rigor that characterize Carll's work as a director are grounded in extensive actor training rooted in an unusually deep lineage. In New York, she trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she studied Meisner and Method with Jackie Bartone — who spent years at Sanford Meisner's right hand — and with Janis Powell, a teacher and director with deep roots in the American acting tradition. It was also in New York that she took her deepest dive into Grotowski, including in a 24-hour paratheatrical workshop with Dzieci, the NYC-based company whose work sits at the intersection of theatre and ritual. At Boston University School for the Arts, she studied acting under Jon Lipsky and Jim Spruill, and was trained in Linklater Technique by Paula Langton — herself a direct protégée of Kristin Linklater. Her undergraduate years at the City University of New York were shaped by an extraordinary mentor: Barbara Sproul, founder and head of the Department of Religion and wife of playwright Herb Gardner, whose shared inquiry into the parallels between theatre and contemplative tradition guided Carll through a self-designed course of study that became the intellectual foundation for everything that followed. That foundation — built in the body, in the rehearsal room, in the lineage of mentors who shaped her and the philosophies that inspire her — is what she brings to the director's chair.

Carll’s work is grounded in a simple and stubborn conviction: that theatre at its best is not entertainment but encounter — a threshold where the boundaries between performer and audience, self and other, momentarily dissolve.

This inquiry has shaped everything from her Shakespeare productions to her actor training work, and finds its fullest expression in a trilogy of original seminar-studio courses — Zen & the Craft of Acting, The Yoga of Grotowski, and An Absolute Encounter — built on the proposition that the actor's quest for presence and the contemplative traditions' quest for presence are, at their root, the same journey.

Since 2018, Carll has expanded her practice into nonprofit development consulting, leading the creation and submission of more than $20 million in grant proposals for arts and nonprofit organizations.

She is currently developing a Shakespeare-based audio storytelling and educational initiative due to launch in fall 2026.