Robert Cucuzza is the Associate Professor of Theatre Arts at Los Angeles Mission College. His theatre directing work runs the gamut of musicals, farce, naturalistic plays, adaptations of classics, original work, and devised pieces. In the Los Angeles area, he has directed plays at REDCAT, South Coast Rep, CalArts, the Steve Allen Theatre, Son of Semele, the Lee Strasberg Institute, and at Pierce College and Occidental College. As a Creative Consultant, he has worked with Miss Prissy and her street dance company The Underground, Rosanna Gamson Worldwide, and with the Creative Entertainment division of Walt Disney Imagineering, where he has developed large scale live events. As a playwright, director and producer in New York, he spent six years as an artist-in-residence at Richard Foreman’s Ontological Theater where he mounted many highly-acclaimed original plays and was a co-founder of the Obie Award-winning Blueprint Series.

As an actor, he is a member of the Obie Award-winning company Elevator Repair Service, with whom he performed in Total Fictional Lie, Room Tone, and originated the role of Tom Buchanan in Gatz — a complete staging of the entire text of “The Great Gatsby.” With ERS and Gatz he has played Off Broadway and on the West End in London, and in major festivals and theaters in the U.S, all over Europe and across the globe. He has also performed in three plays written and directed by Richard Foreman at the legendary Ontological-Hysteric Theater in New York.    

As a filmmaker, he has written, directed, produced and edited the films The Invincible Ecksteins, The Blue Horizon, Speed Freaks and several shorts. His film The Armed Boy— a silent film created to accompany Karl Jenkin’s modern choral mass “The Armed Man”—was commissioned by the Rackham Symphony Choir in Detroit.

As an acting teacher he has taught at CalArts, the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute, and Pierce College. In New York City, he taught at the New York Film Academy and founded ACME Acting Lab, a student-driven acting studio devoted to the creation of professionally produced original plays and films.    

Originally from Bradford, PA, Cucuzza is a 1990 graduate of Carnegie Mellon University where he received a BFA in Literary and Cultural Studies with a minor in Theatre. He holds a 2011 MFA in Directing from CalArts. He was the recipient of a 1990 Thomas J. Watson Fellowship for a one-year independent study of experimental theater in Europe and a 2010-11 recipient of a Beutner Family Award for Excellence in the Arts at CalArts.