Jenna Elser

Jenna’s focus as a stage director is on utilizing lyric theatre to enact social change. She is the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Glow Lyric Theatre, which produces opera, operetta and musical theatre in direct response to the social and political climate of South Carolina. She is also a traveling freelance director throughout the Southeast.

Recent Directing Credits include: Frog & Toad and Ella Enchanted (Atlanta’s Synchronicity Theatre) Spring Awakening (The Warehouse Theatre) Guys and Dolls (Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre), Peter Grimes (Northern Arizona University) Summer and Smoke (Converse Opera Theatre) and Hands on a Hardbody (Guilford Arts Collective). Some of Jenna’s original devised work includes Armed (Glow Lyric Theatre), which reflects on gun violence in the US, and Pulse (AnamCara Theatre), a piece responding to the Orlando mass shooting.

Jenna recently won the American Prize in Directing for her production of West Side Story. She is also a recipient of the Robert Porterfield Directing Award, a finalist for the Drama League New Musicals Fellowship, a Suzi Bass Award Best Direction nominee and was chosen for the 2021 Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers Observership Program. She was named one of South Carolina’s Best and Brightest 35 and under by Greenville Business Magazine. She holds a B.A. in Musical Theatre with a concentration on Women’s Studies from the University of Tulsa, and an MFA in Directing from Florida State University.