Melinda Scott

Melinda J. Scott has served as the Colorado Shakespeare Festival's (CSF’s) Education Outreach Director since September 2001, cultivating programs that use a comprehensive approach to engage learners and teachers in Shakespeare’s text and times. When not administering CSF’s year-round education programs or performing, Ms. Scott teaches acting classes and provides individual coaching to high school seniors preparing for college entrance auditions.
Ms. Scott was “bitten by the acting bug” when she was an 8-year-old Brownie, playing a wicked step-rabbit in her Girl Scout troop's version of Cinder-Rabbit. She has performed numerous roles since⎯and took up facilitating the craft in 1978.
For seven years Ms. Scott was a faculty member of Boulder Conservatory Theatre, a training ground and acting company for young people—serving two years as a member of their artistic team. Her directorial debut with the company was a non-musical version of Les Miserables, followed the next season with a verse play, The Lady's Not for Burning. In 1998, collaborating with twenty-two young actors, she created a script adaptation of Norton Juster's award-winning The Phantom Tollbooth, performed at the National Conference of the American Alliance for Theatre & Education. Ms. Scott became a BCT board member in 1999 and was elected a member their artistic team in January of 2000. In the summer of 2000, she directed her own "brisk" adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Early in 2001, she was hired as a Master Teacher of Directing for BCT's first senior project, which culminated in the original script Superman: Identity, Truth, Courage, Justice. Ms. Scott also served as the production's technical director. In April of the same year, her production of The Miracle Worker broke BCT box office attendance records. Each show was interpreted for the Deaf by ASL student interpreters, commissioned from New Vista High School. She also created the set and sound design. Ms. Scott and Rebekah West co-directed Winter Tales of Dreams and Dreaming, a collection of short stories for children, performed in a variety of theatrical styles, for Boulder Conservatory Theatre, which played to sold-out houses at the Dairy Center for the Arts in December 2001.
Ms. Scott directed New Vista High School students in Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On: a Shakespearean collage of scenes & monologues, which toured Boulder valley middle schools from November 2001 to January 2002. She joined New Vista High School again in the fall of 2003 as an adjunct faculty member, teaching the course “Shakespeare in Production.”
In June 2006 she mounted A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the pilot program “Shakespeare in the Summer,” a 3-week theatre intensive for teens, produced by Dulcie D. Willis of Poudre High School in Fort Collins.
Among her performance credits: she played Sarah in Quilters for Actors Ensemble, which won both best director and best ensemble in the musical theatre category at the Denver Drama Critics Circle Awards. She has worked with Alan Yamamoto and the Colorado Modern Music Festival at Chautauqua doing a live voice-over for the art film Trilogy by Hobart Bell and Russe Wiltse. Melinda tread the boards again at Chautauqua in July of 2004, performing excerpts of Romeo & Juliet with CMF Music Director Michael Christie conducting Prokofiev’s Romeo & Juliet. She has played several roles for the Shakespeare Oratorio Society with founder Dr. J. H. Crouch. She acted for Jack Crouch and Robert Benedetti in CSF’s 30th Anniversary Season. Melinda was seen once again at CSF in 2004, playing the roles of the Abbess and “the pirate girl” in Stephanie Shine’s acclaimed Comedy of Errors.
Ms. Scott received her BFA degree in theatre performance from CU, Boulder. In addition to other post-graduate training she has completed two intensive workshops with Shakespeare & Company out of Lenox, Massachusetts—one for actors and one for Shakespeare educators of youth.