Sasha Wilson
Mentor
Lexington, Massachusetts is where I was raised, in a household that never really stayed in one language for long. From a young age I've been both a polyglot and an artist: Bulgarian at home, French and German at school, and by the time I reached Georgetown University I was reading my way through English Literature and Russian Language with a Spanish minor, all the while treading the boards in productions whenever the timetable allowed. My theatrical debut had come long before any of that, in an 8th grade staging of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in which I played Violet Beauregard. The drama bug, having taken hold, refused to let go. I crossed the Atlantic to train at LAMDA in London and worked my way through its demanding three-year conservatoire course. From there I founded Out Of The Forest Theatre, the multi-award-winning company I still run today, whose work tours internationally. Our work is built around stories from history that have been forgotten or remembered wrongly, retold with live folk music and a contemporary lens. The Edinburgh Fringe Festival has hosted multiple sold-out runs of our productions, and one of those shows has since transferred to Off-Broadway. I'm a published playwright as well, with several independent commissions to my name. For Christmas 2025, The Taunton Brewhouse staged my own adaptation of The Nutcracker, which I also directed. Rose Bruford College is another base of mine: I hold a visiting lectureship there, teach modules on tragedy, and have directed a number of productions for their American Theatre Arts programme.
Three words shape how I approach mentorship: collaboration, curiosity, care. Years of work facilitating workshops and directing theatre have taught me to treat teaching as an ensemble piece, in which each student genuinely owns their ideas and voice. I'm less interested in dictating an outcome than in helping a young writer or thinker shape what is already taking form inside their own head, so that what emerges has the intellectual independence to stand on its own, with the clarity and confidence to back it up. Underneath all of this sits cura personalis, the idea I first met at Georgetown, of caring for the whole person. In practice that translates into building habits of mind: self-belief, resilience, curiosity, paired with proper academic rigour. I push students to be playful, to take risks in their writing, because the most original, compelling work tends to arrive precisely when they feel free to play.
Away from teaching and directing I'm an enthusiastic cook, and the Thanksgiving feast I throw every November at my London home has become something of a fixture. Salsa is another serious pursuit of mine, with gigs up and down the UK performed alongside a band. There is also a Hermann's Dwarf Tortoise in my life by the name of Morticia, small enough to sit in the palm of my hand, who comes out into the back garden with me whenever I want to read in the sun. The books I return to most are P.G. Wodehouse's Right Ho, Jeeves; Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials; and Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night a Traveller.