Adam Marple is a director and designer whose work centers on the audience experience. His performance spaces are a centralizing event for communities to form and for empathy to be spread.

He is a theatre director, educator, researcher, and the Founder and Moderator of The Board of Directors, a global constellation of theatre directors dedicated to building community, sharing knowledge, and transforming the role of the director in the twenty-first century.

Marple has directed more than fifty productions and interdisciplinary works across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, Australia, and Southeast Asia. He has directed more than half of Shakespeare’s canon, frequently adapts classical texts for contemporary audiences, and has written, devised, or adapted sixteen original works. His practice encompasses directing, devising, Viewpoints, audience experience, intercultural collaboration, and sustainable theatre-making.

From 2011 to 2025, Marple served as Co-Artistic Director of The Theatre of Others, an international collective of theatre artists founded in Bali and operating across six continents. During its fourteen-year history, the organization created original performance, audio, and digital work while developing an international community of artists committed to intercultural collaboration, artistic rigor, and sustainable practice. Marple also co-hosted The Theatre of Others Podcast, which reached listeners in 96 countries and ranked among the top five percent of podcasts worldwide.

Through The Board of Directors, Marple now focuses on creating spaces where directors can exchange knowledge, develop relationships, interrogate their practices, and imagine the future of the profession together. The project brings together established and emerging directors across geographic, cultural, and institutional boundaries, emphasizing mentorship, artistic inquiry, ethical leadership, and collective care.

His research centers on Audience Making, an emerging approach to performance that asks how artists intentionally design the conditions through which audiences gather, experience, participate, and create meaning. He is particularly interested in the relationship between directing and community formation: how the choices a director makes before, during, and around a performance can shape not only what an audience sees, but how people encounter one another.

Marple is an Associate Professor of Devising and Directing at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. He has taught internationally at institutions including Lincoln Center Theater, the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, the National School of Drama in India, Goldsmiths University of London, the Victorian College of the Arts, Kyoto University of Art and Design, and the American University of Beirut.

He holds a BFA in Acting from Wright State University and an MFA in Directing from Columbia University.