Member, Commission on Accreditation
Elected March 2025, term ends March 2028
Michael Wainstein has served since 2017 as the Director of the School of Performing Arts at the University of Central Florida (UCF), overseeing departments of theatre, music, and dance. He serves on the boards of the Orlando Shakespeare Theatre, Orlando Family Theatre, and is the producer of UCF Celebrates the Arts, a multi-media performing arts festival in downtown Orlando every April that serves over 15,000 patrons and more than 1000 performing and visual artists. He has previously served as Chair of the Performing Arts program at Savannah College of Art and Design.
Professor Wainstein began his career as a professional performer but quickly became a director. His work in opera has been seen at Cincinnati Opera, Chautauqua Opera, and Chicago Opera Theatre. In addition to work as a director at companies including Seattle Repertory Theatre (as assistant director to Tony Award-winning director Douglas Hughes) and Michael Kahn’s Chautauqua Conservatory Theatre, Professor Wainstein was the artistic director of the Lincoln Playhouse, Topeka Civic Theatre, The Firehouse Center for the Arts, and Florida’s own Naples Music Theatre. He has directed more than 200 productions of plays, musicals, and opera. He is a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, immediate past chair of the Southeastern Theatre Conference musical theater committee, and has been active with the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. In 1992, he was featured in a PBS documentary about an exchange program that he created between Russia’s Liteiny Theatre and the Topeka Civic Theatre.
Professor Wainstein’s book, A Director’s Itinerary, was published by Hackett Publishing in 2012 and a fully-revised second edition was released in 2018.
Professor Wainstein received his Master of Fine Arts degree in Directing from the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music (CCM), and his Bachelor of Arts degree in Theatre and Music from City University of New York – Hunter College.
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Updated April 2025