Ricardo M. Khan
Cofounder, Artistic Director
Crossroads Theatre Company

Ricardo Khan is the co-founder and artistic director of the Crossroads Theatre Company of New Brunswick, NJ.

Under his direction, Crossroads won the 1999 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theater, making it one of the Nation’s most acclaimed African-American theater companies in history.

Recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from Rutgers University in 1997, he is currently a Director/Writer-In-Residence at the Lincoln Center Institute of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, and is a visiting professor for the graduate school for theatre at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. In 1989, he was co-chair of the National Endowment for the Arts’ theater advisory panel and from 1996–2000 was the President of Theatre Communications Group, the national organization of American professional theatres. In recent years Khan has also formed an exciting new multi-national writers’ collective called The World Theatre Lab, involving nearly 30 international writers and based in Johannesburg, London and New York.

Of the nearly 50 professional productions he has directed, Ricardo conceived and directed the award-winning Black Eagles, about the famed Tuskegee Airmen of WWII, for the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York City, Crossroads, and Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. He also directed West Memphis Mojo at the Negro Ensemble Company in New York; And Further Mo,’ which played at Crossroads and The Village Gate in New York City; Late Great Ladies of Blues and Jazz at the world famous Apollo Theatre in Harlem, NY; and The Darker Face of the Earth, by former United States Poet Laureate Rita Dove, for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Crossroads, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC.

His recent directing projects have included Trevor Rhone’s Two Can Play at Queens Theatre in the Park and the Crossroads Theatre; a musical on the life of Nelson Mandela, which he workshopped at the Windybrow Theatre in South Africa and premiered at the Crossroads in 2004; Color Me Dark for the Kennedy Center and Yo Soy Latina!

Most recently, Ricardo served as associate director of Hot Feet on Broadway in 2006, and is the co-writer and director of FLY at Lincoln Center Institute in New York.