Jenny Beth Snyder is a Tennessee born, New York based theater director, production manager and co-founder of theater company Fresh Ground Pepper NYC. Her work with the students at the Lee Strasberg Institute brought you a complicated look at gender and diversity in her production of 12 Angry Men. Her collaboration with the Shelter Theater company brought you the Red Room by Morgan McGuire. The show delves into questions of justice and how forgiveness has a place in the process. Her collaboration with True False Theater on Daria Tavana’s adaptation of Slaughterhouse Five played to sold out houses in the 2013 Fringe Festival and went on to the Encore Series. She collaborated with new playwright Jessica Hernandez on her innovative play regarding faith, commercialism and adulthood titled Man and Coconut in a residency with IRT. She braved the polar vortex in the outdoor, immersive cab show Take Me Home as assistant to Director Meghan Finn in the Incubator’s Arts Other Forces festival.
Through her work with Fresh Ground Pepper she has curated, created, produced multiple works by a diverse array of artists. At FGP, they seek to foster and hone new works and new ways of working. Specifically they foster a room that creates from a place of delight that delights in their own work and that of others. Recently, they held their first ever FGP Festival at the New Ohio in April 2018. This festival featured their Playground Playgroup, In House Artists, New Producer Lab and many additional workshops and art parties. FGP will celebrate their 10 year anniversary next January.
Of late, Jenny has branched out into the world of Production Management. She never handles the same challenge twice and with her experience in directing, she is a sympathetic, artistically minded support systems for projects both large and small- in a theater, or out. Recently, she worked with Rattlestick Playwrights Theater to bring you Lewiston/Clarkston. This show called for a full gut renovation of their historic space. She is also frequent collaborator with Clubbed Thumb Summerworks.
Jenny Beth holds a BFA from NYU Tisch School of the arts. She is a member of the Lincoln Center Theater Director’s Lab in 2013
I am drawn to story telling that stirs remote inner parts of ourselves. I am drawn to work that is rigorously intelligent and defiantly imaginative. I am drawn to stories that have realistic characters but are set in unrealistic places. I am drawn to dystopian societies that are looking for salvation. I make theater that embraces the stage and can’t be captured on film. -Jenny B