MIFA/ Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts brings audiences the finest examples of contemporary practice in opera, theatre, dance, music, flim, visual arts and literature.
Since 1993, MIFA has hosted ground-breaking theatre companies: France's Comedie Francaise in La Derniere Lettre ; Centre Dramatique National/Orleans Loiret-Centre in Requiem pour Srebrenica; England's Complicite in Noise of Time; Out of Joint in Some Explicit Polaroids by Mark Ravenhill and Blue Heart by Caryl Churchill; Two's Company in Ten by Pinter and Some Kind of Alaska; The Moving Theatre productions of De Profundis by Oscar Wilde starring Corin Redgrave, and Sarah Bernhardt Comes to Town by Anton Chekhov starring Vanessa Redgrave; South Africa's Side Street Productions in The Island by Athol Fugard and the Handspring Puppet Company in Faustus in Africa by William Kentridge, and Ireland's Gate Theatre in I'll Go On by Samuel Beckett starring Barry McGovern.
MIFA's opera presentations have included The Coronation of Poppea by Claudio Monteverdi and Alcina by George Frederick Handel in productions by the Onafhankelijk Toneel and the Nationale Reisopera of The Netherlands, and the American debut of Moscow's Helikon Opera in Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades.
Executive Artistic Director Donald T. Sanders, a director, writer, and producer, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. and was awarded a Thouron Fellowship. He received a C.I.D from the University of Bristol, England, and an M.F.A from the Yale School of Drama where he was assistant to Nikos Psacharapoulos and drama master of Stiles College. Known for his stage adaptations from novels, his Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs and Old New York by Edith Wharton were both presented by Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater. Mr. Sanders has been executive artistic director of MIFA/Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts since 1993. He is also the author of 33 Scenes on the Possibility of Human Happiness , Thomas Cole, A Waking Dream and Dubrovsky, the opera by jazz composer William Russo. He has been Director of Theatrical Productions for Ensemble for the Romantic Century (ERC) in New York City since 2005. In 2002, he was made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the Republic of France.
Over the past 17 years, MIFA festival programming has presented 146 events with 1,284 artists from 45 international and national companies including 28 company debuts in America and 12 world premieres. Notable MIFA presentations have included: appearances by Tito Puente, Hilton Ruiz and Eddie Palmiere, Shakespeare’s Globe performance of Love’s Labour’s Lost, Mira and Paul Sorvino in Stella in the Bois de Boulogne; the debut of three contemporary Irish dance companies in Irish Cream; the debut of Mikhail Baryshnikov’s 2004 World Tour; two appearances by France’s Comedie Francaise; Vanessa Redgrave in Sarah Bernhardt Comes to Town; three appearances by Britain’s Out of Joint Company and England’s Complicite in The Noise of Time.
