Catherine Weidner
Meet Catherine
Catherine Weidner is a teacher, professional director and actor. Her book, Acting Heightened Text: The Basics, through Routledge Press, is available in fall 2025. Her professional directing includes Anastasia for Hillbarn Theatre in Foster City, CA; multiple seasons for Theater at Monmouth in Maine, including Two Gentlemen of Verona, Othello, As You Like It, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Much Ado About Nothing. For the Hangar Theatre in Ithaca, NY, she served as Voice and Text Coach for Joe Calarco’s Shakespeare’s R&J, and appeared on stage there in Little Women, Third and Other Desert Cities.
Other professional credits include directing a one-person Henry V for Austin Shakespeare, an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma for Nebraska Repertory Theatre; Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, and Merry Wives of Windsor for the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, and Or, by Liz Duffy Adams at Caffeine Theatre in Chicago. For Ithaca College, she has directed Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Company, Cabaret, and The Last Days of Judas Iscariot.
As an Equity actress she has worked at The Kennedy Center in A Streetcar Named Desire with Patricia Clarkson, Amy Ryan and Noah Emmerich, directed by Garry Hynes; at Center Stage in Baltimore in Blithe Spirit, and Mary Stuart; and at Arena Stage in Washington, DC in The Heidi Chronicles, directed by Tazewell Thompson.
Her film credits include The Night House featuring Rebecca Hall, There is a Hole in the Ground, and One by Le Wang. She has worked at The Guthrie Theater under Garland Wright, Theatre de la Jeune Lune under John Clark Donahue, the La Jolla Playhouse under Des McAnuff, and with Bread & Puppet with Peter Schuman.
She holds a BFA in Acting from Ithaca College and an MFA in Directing from the University of Minnesota, and trained at Complicite in London, The Second City in Chicago and The Neighborhood Playhouse in New York.
For ten years she was the Program Director of The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Academy for Classical Acting at the George Washington University, offering a one-year MFA in Classical Acting under the leadership of Michael Kahn. From 2007- 2013 she taught Classical Acting and Heightened Text at The Theatre School at DePaul University, where she served as Head of BFA Acting. She returned to Ithaca College in 2013 to serve as Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts until 2021. During the COVID pandemic, she was Interim Director of Ithaca College’s London Center, and then returned to the faculty until her retirement from full-time teaching in 2024.
She continues to be engaged in admission, recruitment, and advancement activities at all her previous institutions, and maintains an active practice in coaching public-speaking. Catherine is a member of Actors’ Equity Association, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers (SDC). She recently certified as a Consent-Forward Artist by Intimacy Directors & Choreographers (IDC), and is in the Accelerator Program.
Related writing projects include: an iambic pentameter adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel The Woodlanders, a comic operetta libretto of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s masterpiece The Rivals, and an adaptation of George Eliot’s novel Silas Marner.
