Faculty

Profile

Dennis Hilton-Reid is an actor, director, playwright and educator who has been teaching at The New School since 2018. Recent work includes directing the Pulitzer Prize winning play Ruined by Lynn Nottage for the Athens & Epidaurus Festival in Athens Greece. He also directed the world premiere of the play Silent Voices for the National Theatre of Uganda.

Dennis is a member of the Actors Studio PDU (Playwright, Directors Unit). He developed his one-man show Mandingo of Manhattan as a resident artist at Mabou Mines, for which he was awarded a Jerome Fellowship and a grant from the Puffin Foundation. Dennis has performed Mandingo at Mabou Mines, The Thread Waxing Space, Stand up New York: a benefit for the Artists Against the Contract with America, and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. As an actor, Dennis has performed at regional theaters throughout the country, including the Spoleto Festival in Charleston SC; The Cider Mill Playhouse in Binghamton NY; Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park; Guthrie in Minneapolis; the Kennedy Center, Yale Rep; Voice and Vision (Smith College); Rites and Reason (Brown University). In New York he has appeared at HERE, NADA, the Public Theater, CSC, La Mama, the Ohio Theater, En Garde Arts, and Mabou Mines.

He has directed productions for SUNY Purchase, Fordham University, Powerhouse Theatre, Avalon Theater co; Arc Lite Theater co; EST, Stella Adler and Pace University, NY Stage and Film, AMDA, Circle Rep, AADA and the NJ Shakespeare Festival. 

In 2005 Dennis Hilton-Reid wrote and directed the short comedy film You Cannot Eat Art and in 2017 published The Young Actor’s Notebook.

In addition to the School of Drama at The New School, Dennis has taught at Columbia University, Purchase College, Vassar College, NYU, City College, and Fordham University. Dennis has taught workshops on Chekhov at the Theatro-Ergastirion Drama School in Athens Greece, and on women victims and violence in classical drama in the age of #MeToo, using the techniques of The Emotional Gesture. 

Dennis Hilton-Reid received his MFA from the Yale School of Drama, studied at The American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and recently completed the Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity Certificate Program at Cornell University.