Biography

Rob Melrose is the Artistic Director of Alley Theatre, where he has directed productions of The Da Vinci Code, The Glass Menagerie, The Janeiad, Thornton Wilder’s The Emporium, Pictures from Home, The Servant of Two Masters, Born with Teeth, Sweat, The Winter’s Tale, 1984, and Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. He also adapted and directed A Christmas Carol.

Melrose was formerly the Artistic Director and co-founder of the Cutting Ball Theater. He has directed at The Public Theater, The Guthrie Theater, Asolo Repertory Theatre, The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Magic Theatre, The Old Globe, PlayMakers Rep, and Black Box Theatre, as well as Actors’ Collective, The Gamm Theatre, and Crowded Fire, among others.

He has taught at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, USF, the University of Rhode Island, and Marin Academy. He has a BA in English and Theater from Princeton University and an MFA in directing from the Yale School of Drama.

Rob directed Strindberg’s Svarta Handsken (The Black Glove) in Stockholm, Sweden, at Strindberg’s Intimate Theater. His translations of Woyzeck, Ubu Roi, and Pelleas & Melisande have been published by EXIT Press. He has written a number of plays including: Helen of Troy, The Flat Earth, Divorsosaurus, When Human Voices Wake Us, Asylum, and Serpentyne and has written a rock musical adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s Ozma of Oz.

Thanks to a generous grant from the Roy Cockrum Foundation, he is excited to be directing an unabridged, six-hour, two-part production of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt at Alley Theatre in the Fall of 2027 in a new translation by Paul Walsh.