David J. Roberts currently serves as Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s Interim Managing Director. With over 20 years’ experience in the performing arts, David is a consultant with a background as a producer, manager, and executive leader, with a track record of leading organizations through moments of transformation with roles at institutions including Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation, Classical Theatre of Harlem, and Pearl Theatre Company. Most recently he consulted for Building for the Arts/Theatre Row as Interim Director of Theatre Operations. Prior to that he led 651 ARTS, the Brooklyn-based presenter focused on music, dance, theatre, spoken word, and multi-disciplinary performance of the African diaspora.
David is on faculty at The New School’s College of Performing Arts, where he teaches graduate students a course on Arts Management and Nonprofit Governance. He is also a lecturer in theater management on faculty at David Geffen School of Drama at Yale (DGSD), where he teaches a course on Identity-Specific Theaters and co-teaches the Management Seminar. He serves on the editorial advisory board of DGSD’s Theater Management Knowledge Base and is a co-founder of the Artists’ Anti-Racism Coalition, a grassroots organizing effort to help the Off-Broadway community dismantle systems of exclusion and oppression. He is a 2021 Rockwood Leadership Fellow.