Rachel Hynes is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Dramatic Arts at UNC, Chapel Hill with an expertise in innovative new works and ensemble creation. Her teaching approach balances rigor, mindfulness and play.

Rachel writes, directs and devises physical, experimental and interactive performances as well as sitespecific and interactive work (Art All Night DC and Supernova Performance Art Festival) Her devised adaptation of Euripides’ The Trojan Women was a part of Washington DC’s Women’s Voices Festival and her clown show about menstrual stigma, LadyM, received its world premiere with The Welders, Washington DC’s premiere playwrights collective.

From 2006-2011, Rachel was the Co-Artistic Director of Avant Garde performance group, Helsinki Syndrome, performing in On the Boards’ Northwest New Works Festival, the Henry Art Gallery, Bumbershoot Arts Festival, Annex Theatre (Seattle), Hand2Mouth’s Risk/Reward Series (Portland), Camden People’s Theatre SPRINT Festival (London) and had two residencies at Richard Forman’s Ontological-Hysteric Incubator (NYC).

Rachel is a Master Teaching Artist and has directed and taught with the National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, Montgomery College, Arena Stage’s Voices of Now, Fords Theatre’s National Oratory Fellows Program, Encore Stage and Studio, and Educational Theatre Company (ETC). Most recently, she was the head of Limestone University’s Theatre Program, focusing on remodeled classics and new works, underpinned by personal and entrepreneurial development.

Rachel is a seven-time Artist Fellow with the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, has received multiple project grants from the DCCAH and was the recipient of an Aurand Harris Theatre Grant from the Children’s Theatre Foundation of America. She is a winner of the Larry Neal Award for Dramatic Writing, and was a Producing Playwright with the second cohort of Washington DC’s premier playwriting collective, The Welders.

Rachel earned her MFA in Lecoq Based Actor Created Theatre from Naropa University at the London International School for the Arts (LISPA). She is a member of the Dramatist’s Guild and Network of Ensemble Theaters.