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About the Artistic Director

Paul Frellick is the founding Artistic Director of the Deep Dish Theater Company, where he has staged Endgame, Cat's-Paw, Ancestral Voices, Arms and the Man, A Lesson Before Dying, The Price, Lobby Hero, Hedda Gabler, The Misanthrope, Quilters, The Good Person of Setzuan, and the southeast premieres of Polish Joke, Via Dolorosa, and Permanent Collection. He also conceived and directed the company's Cancer Chronicles presentations, and staged Adam Sobsey’s Hang Town Fry in a co-production with A Southern Season.

Paul grew up in Evansville, Indiana, where his first experience in the theater was playing the title character in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. He graduated cum laude from Yale University and subsequently free-lanced for several years as an actor/director, working for such theaters as the Denver Center Theatre Company; the Indiana Repertory Theater; the Idaho Shakespeare Festival; the Seacoast Repertory Theatre in New Hampshire; the American Stage Company in St. Petersburg, Florida; and San Diego's Old Globe Theatre. Among his favorite projects were productions of All's Well That Ends Well, Loot, Too Marvelous for Words, Macbeth, Quilters, Biloxi Blues, and Billy Bishop Goes to War.

He lived for eight years in Chicago, where he served as Artistic Director of the Organic Theater and directed at several of the city's other Off-Loop stages. Among his projects were the world premieres of Of Grapes and Nuts, Role Play, and I Was Really Very Hungry (both on stage and, with Anne Archer, for a Chicago Theater on the Air radio broadcast), as well as work developing new scripts with Chicago Dramatists Theater. He remains a die-hard Cubs fan.

Since coming to Chapel Hill with his wife, Dr. Grace Baranek, in 1996, he has directed for many of the Triangle's theater companies. His credits include The Monogamist for Manbites Dog Theater; A Walk in the Woods and the American premiere of Rainshark for the GlobalArts Initiative; A Question of Mercy for the Burning Coal Theatre Company; Private Eyes for the Flying Machine Theatre Company; and Dark Rapture for the UNC-CH Professional Actors Training Program. He conceived and directed the revue, Politically Bent, for the ArtsCenter of Carrboro, and his writing projects include adapting Tim O'Brien's novel, In the Lake of the Woods, for the stage and co-authoring the play, Of Trailers and Trenches, about the plight of first-year teachers.