I believe that good art comes from good rooms.
I create healthy, rigorous, collaborative and playful rehearsal rooms.
I am obsessed with making work that is visceral- that gets you in the gut and changes the air in the room.
I am committed to rebellious new stories and to rebellious reframing of old stories.
Creating a play should feel like falling in love.
Upcoming
Writing, plotting, scheming, learning, and facing the sea of unknowns with as much grace as I can muster. Sending solidarity to all!
Hannah Simms
is a director, teacher, and playwright based in Hartford, CT.
She is a graduate of the Dell’Arte School of Physical Theatre and the NationaI Theatre Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center; and is a current Ada Comstock Scholar at Smith College.
In 2005 she moved to Hartford, and began to fall in love with what is secretly The Greatest City In the World. That very weekend, in a series of events involving a scavenger hunt, she met HartBeat Ensemble. HartBeat has been her artistic home ever since.
With HartBeat, she has directed Pegao, Frog Hollow State of Mind, and Asylum Hill: Meet Us Where We Are, as well as countless readings and workshops. Other directing credits include To Kill A Mockingbird (Central CT State University), Guenevere, To Fall In Love, and The Robertassey (Ivoryton Playhouse Women Playwright’s Initiative), Eurydice and Dearly Departed, (PVPA Charter School), Twelfth Night (Hampshire Shakespeare), Playhouse on Park’s Playwrights series, Hartford Stage’s Write On festival, and seven Shakespeare productions with the geniuses at Hampshire Shakespeare Young Company.
Hannah has assisted for Leta Tremblay on The City That Cried Wolf at 59E59 and for Rachel Alderman on HartBeat’s Gross Domestic Product.
She speaks Spanish and French, and has also been a burlesque emcee, a stilt walker, and a goat farmer. Please do not get her started on the topic of goats.
Recent
2020
September:
Bandwidth at The Brick’s With An Abundance of Caution digital series.
April:
Bandwidth at Quick Quarantined Festival , Vintage Soul Productions.
February / March: Studying in Havana, Cuba with dramaturg Osvaldo Hernández.
2019
December:
Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom by Sylvia Plath. Smith College New Play Reading Series
November:
Biennale by Paul Richards and Wendy Steiner. Hartford Opera Theater’s New In November.
August:
Measure for Measure. Hampshire Shakespeare Young Company.
May:
Pegao, by Cin Martinez. HartBeat Ensemble.