Atelier Faculty

Cara Reichel

Cara Reichel headshot

Photo by Diane Phelan

About

Cara Reichel is the founding Producing Artistic Director of New York City’s critically-acclaimed, OBIE and Drama Desk Award-winning Prospect Theater Company. For more than two decades she has been a leader in the field of new musical theater development.

She collaborates frequently with fellow founding Prospect artist, composer / lyricist Peter Mills. They have created over a dozen new musicals, including: The Hello Girls (2019 Outer Critics Circle Award nominations for Outstanding Direction, Book, Score, and Production; three Drama Desk Award nominations including Outstanding Production), Death for Five Voices, The Underclassman, Golden Boy of the Blue Ridge, The Flood and Illyria.

Cara directed the NYC premiere of Einstein’s Dreams, a musical based on the book by Alan Lightman, which received multiple 2020 Drama Desk Award nominations. As a director, she has developed works at the O’Neill Theatre Center, the National Alliance for Musical Theatre’s Festival of New Musicals, Phoenix Theatre Company, Surflight Theatre, Goodwill Theatre, and the Village Theatre’s Festival of New Musicals. She has collaborated with numerous writing teams on readings, workshops, and productions of new shows.

As a writer, Cara is co-librettist on The Oscar Micheaux Project, a new jazz musical featured in the 2023 NAMT Festival of New Musicals and developed at Goodspeed Musicals’ Johnny Mercer Writers Grove. She was commissioned by Theatrical Rights Worldwide and BMG to create a female-forward jukebox musical, The Olympians, featuring hit songs by artists such as Tears for Fears, The Chicks, Hall & Oates, Kelly Clarkson, and more. She has participated in the Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, was a 2019 Fellow at the Women’s International Study Center and a 2015 Bogliasco Fellow in Italy.

Cara was educated at Princeton and in the M.F.A. Program for Directing at Brooklyn College. She has led master classes for the American Theatre Wing’s Springboard program and served as a teaching artist at undergraduate programs including Pace University and Molloy College CAP21.

Campus Address

Lewis Arts complex
122 Alexander Street