Andy White

ANDREW WHITE is a founding member of Lookingglass Theatre Company, where he currently serves as Artistic Director (a position he previously held from 1990-92). As a Lookingglass Ensemble Member and performer, he has participated in the workshop and development of more than thirty Lookingglass original adaptations and world premieres. He wrote and directed the company’s 1989 production of Of One Blood, about the 1964 murders of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in Mississippi. In 2004, he wrote and directed an adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984, which received a Joseph Jefferson Award for Best Adaptation.

Andy was in the 1987 production of Alice, from which Lookingglass derived its name and mission. Since then, his Lookingglass acting credits include The Arabian Nights (1992, 1997, 2009), Our Town, The Wooden Breeks, The Old Curiosity Shop, Hillbilly Antigone, The Secret in the Wings, Race, Summertime, Her Name Was Danger, They All Fall Down, Metamorphoses, Metamorphosis, Eye of the Beholder, The Master and Margarita, S/M, The Third Voyage, The Jungle, and The Odyssey.

Andy has also appeared in Northlight Theatre’s Inherit the Wind, the Goodman’s All the Rage, Steppenwolf’s Winesburg, Ohio and Another Time, and Victory Gardens’ Kids in the Dark. Film work includes Love and Action in Chicago, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Since You’ve Been Gone, and American Anthem. His television credits include TV 101, Eerie, Indiana, W.I.O.U., and Missing Persons.

Andy has worked in corporate, non-profit, and classroom environments, structuring and facilitating conversations with participants around organizational and community issues since 1990. He has worked in Lookingglass Outreach and Education programs with students of all ages: developing and implementing arts-integrated units in elementary and high schools; facilitating faculty workshops in schools across the Chicagoland area; and working with teenagers across the city to use theater as a means of engaging their peers in dialogue about community issues, from HIV to racism. He has taught Acting as an Adjunct Faculty Member at Northwestern University (B.S., 1987) and National-Louis University. He has worked with medical students and patients at the Rehabilitation Institute; and served as an Illinois Artist-in-Residence at schools in Chicago, Evanston, and Park Ridge. For the last eight years, Andy has been a facilitator with the Anti-Defamation League, and led Summer Institute sessions with teachers for Facing History and Ourselves, with the goal of using theatre techniques to enhance the toolbox with which faculty bring curriculum to their students.

In 2007, Andy co-founded Mosaic Experience, a company dedicated to dialogue and an arts-based approach to facilitating conversations about diversity. Mosaic Experience works with educational institutions, non-profit organizations, and corporations throughout Chicagoland. He has also worked as writer and director with The Breakthrough Group (2003 to present), constructing and designing scenarios which address the various needs of diverse corporate clients.

He lives with his wife, Shari, and their two children, Julia and Asher.