Britt Berke is a director who loves to develop, doctor, and dissect. Her work interrogates how love, power, and femininity are all inherently intertwined and revolutionized; often staging  delight and spectacle as a means of examining intimacy and taboo. Britt nourishes the development of new work in conversation with a more inclusive repertory. 

Britt directed the World Premiere of Becomes a Woman by Betty Smith (author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) with Mint Theater Company. This six-week engagement at New York City Center Stage II was nominated for the 2023 Outer Critics Circle Award for Best New Off-Broadway Play. In reviewing the production for The New Yorker, Ken Marks wrote: 

“It’s a rare play that can inspire applause from a line of dialogue and cheers as the lights go down on the final act, odder still for one getting its world première nearly a century after it was written. But that’s what’s happening at the Mint’s production of this remarkable 1931 drama by Betty Smith, the author of the novel “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” directed by Britt Berke.“ 

Britt is currently directing Ruby Karp’s comedy special, I Don’t Trust Adults. In 2021, she directed Anne Carson’s Antigonick with Torn Out Theater, a company that utilizes selective nudity to highlight dramaturgical themes and promote body autonomy. You can read more via Brooklyn Magazine and TheaterMania. More recent projects include: DOGS (Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep); w a t c h m e (New York Theatre Workshop, Adelphi Residency); FLASH (a musical theatre fundraiser for NourishNYC); Promenade in concert (The Public Theatre’s Fornés Marathon); Liberian Girl in Brooklyn (Mabou Mines); For Your Consideration (Moxie Arts / DR2); Round Room (Origin Theater’s 1st Irish Festival - Best Director nom); and workshops with La MaMa, The Uptown Collective, and Cherry Lane Theatre.

Britt is a recipient of ART NY’s Funds for Anti-Oppression Work and a 2021 City Artist Corps Grant. She is the Co-Founder and Associate Artist of November Theatre (a transatlantic collective focused on new play development and supported by Arts Council England) and an alumna of the Leon Levy Roundabout Directors Group, Cohort 4, the inaugural Mercury Store Directing Intensive, the Manhattan Theatre Club Directing Fellowship, the National Alliance for Musical Theatre Directing Observership, and 24 Hour Plays: Nationals. Associate Member, SDC.

In 2022, Britt was the assistant to Lileana Blain-Cruz on The Skin of our Teeth (Tony nomination) and to JoAnne Akalaitis on Mud / Drowning (Obie Award). She is proud to have assisted and learned from Tamilla Woodard, Gabriel Vega Weissman, Portia Krieger, Katherine Wilkinson, Alice Reagan, Shannon Sindelar, Kara Strait, and Kara Feely.

Britt graduated magna cum laude from Barnard College of Columbia University, where she completed the selective Senior Thesis in Directing and received the the Kenneth Janes Prize in Theatre for Outstanding Intellectual and Artistic Achievement.