Gabor Tompa

Education

Theatre and Film Academy, Bucharest, Romania


Biography

Gabor Tompa received his training at the Theatre and Film Academy in Bucharest, Romania and began working as a professional director in 1981. Since then, he has directed more than 100 productions worldwide including plays by Shakespeare, Moliere, Chekhov, Beckett, Bulgakhov, Büchner, Camus and Ionesco. In 1990 he was appointed Artistic Director of the Hungarian Theatre in Cluj, Romania , a post he has held up to the present time. He served as Head of Directing at the Theatre Academy in Tirgu Mures , Romania and has been a guest teacher at the State University of Cluj, Academie Theatrale de L’Union, Limoges, Schauspielschule Freiburg, Brunel University , London, National University of Seoul and Institut del Teatre Barcelona . Professor Tompa is the recipient of many awards (four times Best Director of the Year in Romania , Best Foreign Performance of the Year in England etc.) and has received widespread recognition in Europe for his physically adventurous and conceptually audacious productions of classic plays. He is directing worldwide including France, Germany, Spain, United Kingdom, Austria, Hungary, Ireland, Canada, South Korea, Czech Republic, Slovenia and Serbia. He received the 2002 UNITER Award for Excellence for the many achievements of his career. His film, “Chinese Defense,” won the Best First Feature Award at the International Film Festival in Salerno, Italy in 1999 and has been officially selected for the 1999 Berlin Festival. Four times Best Director of the Year, he received the Best Performance of the Year Award in 2009 for Three Sisters and his production of Born for Never has been voted as Critics’ Choice no. 1 in the 2009 Festival of Avignon. Mr. Tompa is also the author of several volumes of poetry and essays on the theatre.His book, Label Curtain, has been published in English by Bookart and has been presented at the BookExpo America in New York, 2015. Mr. Tompa served as Head of Directing in the department between 2007-2015 and continues to teach both graduate and undergraduate classes in History of Directing and Directing.