Co-Directors
CHARLOTTE MEEHAN, Executive Artistic Director (she/her/hers) co-founded Sleeping Weazel with David Hopkins in 1998 for productions of new stage works and audio theatre in the UK and New York. She re-launched the company with Adara Meyers in Boston (2012), and has since been premiering multimedia performance works at venues including Boston Center for the Arts (within a three-year residency), Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, ArtsEmerson, and the old Factory Theatre. Sleeping Weazel has premiered her multimedia plays, Cleanliness, Godliness, and Madness: A User’s Guide, Real Realism, and 27 Tips for Banishing the Blues. Most recently, the Company premiered Elliot Norton Award-winning The Audacity: Women Speak, which she conceived and arranged from the real-life stories of more than 30 women ranging from gender bias to sexual assault. The Boston Globe named that production one of the top ten of 2019. Previous stage works have been presented in Providence at Perishable Theatre, in Bristol (UK), and in New York at Dixon Place, the Flea Theater, La MaMa, Bleecker Street Theatre, and Pratt Institute, among others. She has been a resident artist in HERE Arts Center’s HARP program (NY), was a 2008-09 Howard Foundation fellow in playwriting, and was awarded an Alpert/MacDowell residency through the Herb Alpert Foundation. Professor Meehan is Playwright-in-Residence and Mary Heuser Chair in the Arts at Wheaton College (MA).
JESSICA ERNST, Managing Director (she/her/hers), is a Boston-based freelance director and producer. Her directing credits include Julius Caesar (MIT), Living Landscape (Sleeping Weazel, film), Romeo and Juliet (Eastern Nazarene College), Henry IV (Praxis Stage), The Women Who Mapped The Stars (The Nora Theatre Company, world premiere), Daughter of Venus (Artists’ Theatre of Boston), The Love of the Nightingale (Open Theatre Project), The Weaver of Raveloe (Oberon, world premiere), Hedda Gabler (The Longwood Players), and various short plays and staged readings. She has worked as an assistant director and/or artistic intern at the Huntington Theatre Company, New Repertory Theatre, and Actors’ Shakespeare Project. With The Poets’ Theatre, she produced, curated, and directed The Ghostlight Series — a performance series exploring poetry in performance, new plays, and more. Jessica is the Director of Development and Capital Campaign Director at The Theater Offensive and holds an MS in Arts Administration from Boston University.
SAM NOBLE, Associate Artistic Director (they/she), is a playwright and educator based in the greater Boston area. Noble’s plays have been produced through Boston Playwright’s Theatre, Smith College, Perseverance Theatre, Copious Love Productions, Sunny Side of the Street Theater, The Rockwell Winter Playwright Series, Works With Water and as part of the Boston Theatre Marathon. They have acted as a fellow in the Louise W. and Edmund J. Kahn Liberal Arts Institute and through New Repertory Theatre’s Next Voices fellowship, and are an alum of the Kennedy Center’s MFA Playwright’s Workshop and an affiliated artist with the National New Play Network. Noble has worked as a dramaturg developing new works through Boston University and Boston Playwright’s Theatre, and has taught various styles of writing at Boston University, Bay Path University, Wheaton College, Emerson College, at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, and as part of the Massachusetts Young Playwright’s Project. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Playwriting from Boston University.