ALEX HIGGIN-HOUSER
EDUCATOR, DRAMATIST, & THEATRE MAKER
Onstage
Alex Higgin-Houser (he/him) is an educator, dramatist, and theatre-maker.
His most recent commercially produced work, Haymarket, won Chicago's Joseph Jefferson Award for Best New Musical, and his most recent piece, Discovery, written in collaboration with a number of former NASA astronauts, has twice been selected for the Catwalk Developmental Artists Residency in New York. His opera Shadow on the Wall, a shadow-puppet opera about the pardoned Blackwater mercenaries, was recently produced by the American Opera Project. His piece Adventurers, a new musical set in the world of Dungeons and Dragons, will be workshopped at Whitman College in the Spring of 2024.
Photo: Alex (left) and David Kornfeld accept the 2019 Joseph Jefferson Award for Best New Musical. Photo by Joe Mazza/ Brave Lux.
Backstage
As founding Artistic Director of Underscore Theatre Company, Alex directed and produced musical theatre in Chicago from 2011 to 2018, while curating and co-producing a number of world premiere musicals with the Chicago Musical Theatre Festival, which he co-founded in 2014. As an arts administrator, Alex has served as marketing director for the Greenhouse Theater Center, audience services director at Victory Gardens Theater, as well as telemarketing and fundraising manager at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. Recently, Alex was assistant to composer and lyricist William Finn (Falsettos, 25th Annual) during the creation of a new song cycle.
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Having received his MFA in Musical Theatre Writing from NYU Tisch, Alex has worked with students at The New School on Broadway, Elon University, The University of Chicago, and most recently at Whitman College, where he is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre and Dance. At Whitman and elsewhere, he teaches acting, playwriting, dramaturgy, shadow puppetry, songwriting, and a number of other special topics. This academic year, Alex redesigned Whitman College's playwriting curriculum, bringing select plays from page to stage in a year-long new works development process.
Offstage
Originally from Minneapolis, Alex has lived in Manhattan, Queens, Berlin, rural Massachusetts, Chicago, and Walla Walla, Washington, where he currently lives with his wife, Dr. Francesca Chubb-Confer, and their son, August.
As an amateur home chef and baker, Alex has been tracking new recipes and techniques on his instagram account, which is essentially just pictures of food, baby Auggie, and the family pets: Ragueneau, a pug/basenji mix, Balthazar, a grumpy old cat, and Prudencia, the tuxedo rescue kitten. Alex volunteers weekly at the Walla Walla public library as a Dungeon Master for their wildly popular Dungeons & Dragons adventure league, writes music with the Walla Walla songwriters collective, and this summer will be teaching shadow puppetry and musical theatre as part of Walla Walla Community College's re-launched "Kids College" program.
