Maria Manuela Goyanes Announced as 2024/25 Conservatory Convocation Speaker

Shenandoah Conservatory is delighted to announce that Maria Manuela Goyanes, artistic director of Washington D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, will serve as its honored guest and speaker for this year’s Conservatory Convocation.

Convocation takes place at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 28, in Ohrstrom-Bryant Theatre. Each year, Conservatory Convocation welcomes incoming and returning conservatory students with a dynamic lineup of music, theatre and dance performances showcasing the conservatory’s extraordinary student artists. The event also features a keynote address by a noted arts leader.

Prior to joining Woolly, she served as the director of producing and artistic planning at The Public Theater, where she oversaw the day-to-day execution of a full slate of plays and musicals at the Public’s five-theater venue at Astor Place and the Delacorte Theater for Shakespeare in the Park in New York City. Earlier in her career at The Public, she managed some of the theater’s most celebrated productions, including “Hamilton” by Lin-Manuel Miranda, “Josephine & I” by Cush Jumbo, “Straight White Men” by Young Jean Lee, “Barbecue” by Robert O’Hara, and “Here Lies Love” by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim.

While at The Public, Goyanes also held a position on the adjunct faculty of Juilliard and curated the junior year curriculum of the Playwrights Horizons Theater School at New York University. She has guest lectured at Bard College, Barnard College, Brown University, Columbia University, Juilliard, the National Theater Institute at The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, University of California San Diego, the University of Texas-Austin, and Yale University, among others.

Since 2015, Goyanes has also served as a member of the board of the National Alliance for Musical Theatre. From 2006 to 2008, she co-chaired the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab with Jason Grote, and from 2004 to 2012, Goyanes was the executive producer of 13P, one of her proudest achievements. Goyanes is a first-generation Latinx-American, born to parents who emigrated from the Dominican Republic and Spain. She was raised in Jamaica, Queens, and has a collection of hoop earrings to prove it. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in 2001, from Brown University.

Conservatory Convocation is for current Shenandoah Conservatory students, faculty and staff; it is not open to the general public.