Assistant Professor
Resident Playwright
Playwriting
Directing
Acting
Office: Waller Hall, Room 206C
E-mail: Jason.Chimonides@iup.edu
Phone: 724-357-4026
“The artist is a creative intellectual, not an inspired idiot.”
—1956 Brown Report, Harvard University
A self-described “non-denominational creative artist,” Jason holds both a B.A in Drama and an M.F.A in Theater Directing from Florida State University. He has taught performance, directing, interdisciplinary creativity, drama appreciation, and playwriting at IUP, Florida State University, Brooklyn College, Pace University, Farleigh Dickenson University, and Firespark! Arts Camp, as well as the Alliance Theatre Acting Program.
His directing credits include work for the Vital Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Source, Juggernaut Theatre Company, Theatre Jacksonville, the Electric Theatre, Florida State University, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and IUP, where productions include KC-ACTF Region II selections The Beauty Queen of Leenane and Lindsey’s Oyster as well as Picnic, GOSSIP! and The Crucible. As a performer, Jason has worked with Ground UP Productions, the Alliance Theatre, Georgia Shakespeare Festival, Horizon Theatre, and Theatrical Outfit, among many others.
Jason’s original plays—The Optimist, serverLove, The Bluest Water: A Hurricane Camille Story, The Stone Age, Humans: An Elf Story, and Lars Loomis, Being—were all developed with the assistance of Manhattan Class Company’s Playwright’s Coalition, of which he is a member. His work has been professionally produced by Ground UP Productions in New York City, La Cosa Nostra in Chicago, and the Blue Ridge Summer Theater Festival in Amherst, Va. Screenplays include: My Psychedelic Summer, The Stone Age (both cowritten with Neil Butler), and Shock & Awe.
Workshops and Fellowships: Lincoln Center Directors Lab, Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive, Naked Angels, Ars Nova/Underwood Theatre, MCC Playlab, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA)
The Optimist is published internationally by Dramatists Play Service. Excerpted monologues from it are anthologized by Smith and Krauss.
Also a musician and songwriter, the Cinema Twin (Indie Pop music and video project, principle collaborator: cosongwriter Zollie Maynard) is an ongoing creative adventure.
Teaching Philosophy:
I believe that drama is a metaphor for existence; an empathic and imaginative exchange of energy and intention between human beings.
The study of drama, as a component of the liberal arts framework, lays a foundation of craft and creativity vital to a student’s engagement with both their college experience as well as their future endeavors. Central to this conviction is drama’s nature as a collaborative and interdisciplinary art form—one that borrows from, and feeds into, all imaginable disciplines.
Exploring the intersections and interconnection evoked by artistic practice sharpen students’ imagination, critical thinking, and communication skills and develops social and creative confidence. College, for the engaged drama major, is immersive, experiential, and growth-inducing in a myriad of ways; the blinding “axis-mundi” where institutional education and the developing spirit meet. And, as graduates, students transformed by this experience are thus more fully poised to access a world in which rich, self-actualizing paths are open to them, both personally and professionally.
As an educator, above all, I am committed to eliciting and promoting the joy of the creative process. I do this work for a simple reason: because it nourishes a very vital part of my humanity, and it is this that I advance in my teaching: the discovery and celebration of deep human creativity, expression, and play. If drama is an image for life, than dramatic training is life training, and it is of inestimable value to all of us, no matter which side of the “stage” we might happen to find ourselves.
