Who

André Bishop is the artistic director at the Lincoln Center Theater. He's known for producing musicals such as Contact and The Light in the Piazza, as well as for championing young talent.

Backstory

Bishop started out working for the New York Shakespeare Festival and the American Place Theatre, then joined the influential off-Broadway theater Playwrights Horizons as artistic director and literary manager in 1978. Despite the theater's limited budget, Bishop earned a reputation for bringing innovative works by contemporary playwrights to the stage, and was tapped to serve as artistic director of the Lincoln Center Theater in 1991. Today, he runs the Center's Playwrights Program, which helps new artists develop their work.

Of note

Productions put on by Lincoln Center during Bishop's tenure include Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia, Eric Bogosian's Suburbia, and Adam Guettel's The Light in the Piazza. He's staged three Pulitzer Prize-winning works at Lincoln Center over the years—The Heidi Chronicles, Driving Miss Daisy and Sunday in the Park with George. A very close friend of the late Wendy Wasserstein, Bishop produced nearly all of her works in the '80s and '90s at Playwrights Horizons and, later, at Lincoln Center Theater. In recent years, he has been outspoken about wanting to bring more "serious" musicals to Lincoln Center. To wit, he brought New Brain (about a songwriter having brain surgery) and Parade (which focused on the murder of a 13 year-old girl) to the institution.

For the record

Bishop delivered the opening remarks at Wendy Wasserstein's memorial tribute at Lincoln Center in 2004. "I feel as if my heart and mind stopped on Jan. 30 in room 1917 of Memorial Hospital," he said to the packed room, which included such longtime Wasserstein friends as Meryl Streep, Swoosie Kurtz, and Terrence McNally.

Personal

Bishop's longtime partner is theater producer Peter Manning. The couple lives in a three-story townhouse in Yorkville, which Bishop bought for $3.775 million in 2008.

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