Micāne-Zālīte, Dace (USA/Latvia)
Dace Micāne-Zālīte has had more than 20 years of experience as a theater director and playwright. She is a globally thinking theater director with a unique signature - innovative, with a strong passion for humanity, ecologically thinking and with a highly artistic approach to Children’s Musicals. Dace’s directing vibrantly relates life stories, folklore and brings to the audience a certain excitement in her staged productions. She is an Instructor in Acting as well as Drama.
Dace’s roots are in the Baltic region of Northern Europe, Latvia, where she trained in theater schools based on Stanislavsky’s method. She received her Theater Director’s degree in 1989 from the Latvia State Conservatory. Dace is a professionally trained playwright at University os Latvia (Riga) and has had extensive experience in working with children and adolescents in Theater Arts instruction. In the Latvian TV industry Dace was the director for several adapted BBC TV productions.
In the 2007-2008 academic year Dace was selected as a mid career professional stage director to study as a Special Research Fellow at the Yale School of Drama in the Directing Department. Her artistic experience with Children’s Musical Theatre was a green light for her studies at Yale. While at Yale her mentors were nationally known theatre directors – Professors Elizabeth Diamond, James Bundy and Robert Woodruf.
Dace is also a columnist for the American Latvian newspaper Laiks where she publishes her articles on Latvian children’s education, Latvian culture and folklore. In her poetry, Dace focuses on the vision for the World as it is fulfilled with metaphors of Nature’s and the human soul’s beauty. In her works she integrates Latvian as well as Indo-European traditions and folklore in her directed plays reflecting humanity’s bonds with Nature.
In 2010 Dace was invited as a lecturer at several American Latvian Association conferences in several Latvian Cultural Centers regarding Latvian mythology - Denver Colorado, and at the Embassy of the Republic of Latvia in Washington DC.
Dace resides in Guilford CT, with her son Krišjānis who attends 7th grade at the Elisabeth C. Adams Middle School, and her husband , Dr. Edward Zalitis, who is a practicing pediatrician in North Haven and on staff at the Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital.
Recently Dace received a grant from the Latvian American Association and published her first poetry book Vāveru gane (Shepardess of the Squirrels), poetry written in the past 6 years while residing in the United States. Currently Dace teaches Theater Arts at a local Elemantary schools Drama club and writes plays for the Drama Club educational programs. In 2010-2011 she wrote the plays Aurora Borealis and Finding Monet.
Read Aurora Borealis.
Read Finding Monet.