Jonathan Gillman

For more than thirty years, Jonathan Gillman has been the Director of Looking In Theatre, a “teen interactive social issue” theater group. Looking In has performed for half a million people, and changed thousands of lives. Looking In was the recipient of the 2017 Katharine Hepburn Award, given by the state of Connecticut, for Using the Arts as a Platform for Social Change.

His book “Looking In” was published in May, 2017. Creative non-fiction, it follows ten teenaged actors through a year of being in the group as their issues intertwine and overlap with those of its audiences.

For more information, visit www.crecschools.org/lookingin

His book, “My Father, Humming”, an “enormously moving series of poems that reads like a novel”, follows his once-brilliant father’s decline with Alzheimer’s, and Jonathan’s acceptance of him—both who he had been and who he was becoming—and of his own mortality. A book of “hope, solace and healing”, “for anyone who has lost someone,” it was a finalist for the 2014 Paterson Poetry Prize.

For more information, visit myfatherhumming.com.

Previous books include two works of interconnected short stories, “Grasslands” and “The Magic Ring.”

His first novel, “Captivity”, was published in October 2018.

Jonathan is also the former long-term head of the theater department at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, a public magnet arts high school.