Joe Turner Cantú, Associate Professor
An actor trainer, director, and playwright, Joe is head of the acting program, as well as Artistic Director of Oxford Shakespeare Festival. Joe is a teacher of acting, directing, and playwriting. His teaching expertise is in acting process, acting styles, and directing. His professional playwriting credits include several productions throughout the country of his play Rock and Betty Dance, winner of a Rockefeller playwriting grant award. His play American Cowgirls performed at a theatre festival in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria. He served as director of two playwriting festivals, the New England Festival of New Works and the Texas Playwrights Festival. His artistic directing background includes Artistic Director of Penobscot Theatre Company in Maine in the early 1990s and as Associate Artistic Director of a Houston equity theatre, Stages Repertory Theatre, for four years in the 1980s. Joe’s professional directing credits include such companies as Grand Canyon Shakespeare Festival, Capitol City Playhouse in Austin, the Latino Theatre Festival (St. Ed’s) in Austin, Virginia Shakespeare Festival, Stages Repertory Theatre, and Penobscot Theatre Company. He has directed Othello, The Compleat Works of Wllm Shakspr (Abridged), A Midsummer Night ’s Dream, and As You Like It for Oxford Shakespeare Festival. In July 1995, the North American Cultural Institute of Perú brought Joe to Lima to direct a professional Spanish language production of Tennessee Williams’ La Noche de La Iguana at the Teatro Bi-Nacional. In 2003, Joe produced and directed Ole Miss students and faculty in a Spanish translation of El Zoo de Cristal (The Glass Menagerie) which was chosen to represent the US at the first Lima, Peru, International Theatre Festival. Joe directed Hamlet for the 1996 Grand Canyon Shakespeare Festival premiere season and Romeo & Juliet in 1997. Joe’s list of directing credits include Mr. Marmalade, A Streetcar Named Desire, Our Town, It's a Wonderful Life, The Tempest , Rock and Betty Dance, Angels in America: Part One, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, Inherit the Wind, Tartuffe At Holy Spirit Broadcasting, Bent, Marisol, Noises Off!, Steiglitz Loves O’Keeffe, Tobacco Road, To Kill A Mockingbird, Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Colored Museum, Salonika, Curse of the Starving Class, and The Crucible. Joe has also taught at the University of Texas, the University of Michigan, Northern Arizona University and at his alma mater, Southern Methodist University, where he earned his MFA in Acting. Other plays written by Joe are Crown of Thunder (which received its world premiere at Ole Miss Theatre in 2004,) Dante Under the River Palm, Lady Cosmo’s Lincoln, Being Sebastian, and Suite Dementia. He is a member of The Dramatists Guild, Inc. In 2006, Joe was the recipient of the Cora Lee Graham Award for Outstanding Teaching of Freshmen.
Contact Information
- Office Location: Isom 110
- Phone: (662) 915-5745
- E-Mail: jtcantu@olemiss.edu
Courses Taught
- Liba 102 - Freshman Seminar
- Thea 110 - Freshman Performance Studies I
- Thea 169 - Voice and Movement
- Thea 211 Sophomore Performance Studies
- Thea 310 - Junior Performance Studies I
- Thea 311 - Junior Performance Studies
- Thea 410 - Senior Performance Studies I
- Thea 411 - Senior Performance Studies
Areas of Specialization
- actor training, playwriting, directing and producing, acting Shakespeare
Education
- BFA, MFA (Southern Methodist)
