Jared Mezzocchi is an two-time OBIE Award-winning theater artist, working as a director, multimedia designer, playwright, and actor. Mezzocchi’s work has appeared at notable theaters nationwide, including the Kennedy Center, the Geffen Playhouse, Arena Stage, Woolly Mammoth (company member), and many more. In 2016, he received the Lucille Lortel and Henry Hewes Award for his work in Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone at the Manhattan Theatre club. In 2020, the New York Times spotlighted his multimedia innovations alongside the pandemic work of four other theater artists, including Andrew Lloyd Webber and Paula Vogel. His work on Sarah Gancher’s Russian Troll Farm (co-director & multimedia designer) was also celebrated as a New York Times critic pick, and praised for being one of the first digitally native successes for virtual theater. In 2023, this digital production of Russian Troll Farm won Jared his second OBIE as director and multimedia designer (a citation that recognized the entire creative team). In 2021, Mezzocchi also co-directed What If If Only, a world premiere of a new Caryl Churchill play, alongside Tony Award nominated director Les Waters.
Mezzocchi also created and performed two new works of digital theater during the pandemic: On the Beauty of Loss (Vineyard Theatre, NYC) and Someone Else’s House (Geffen Playhouse, LA). He is currently working on a new commission through Vineyard Theater and Engarde Arts for the 2023-24 season, as well as a new online commission for HERE Arts new URHERE digital platform called Section 230.
Mezzocchi is a two-time MacDowell Fellow, a 2012 Princess Grace Award winner, and is an Associate Professor at The University of Maryland, where he teaches in the M.F.A. Design program for the projection and multimedia track. He is also co-director of The Maya Brin Institute for New Performance. Mezzocchi has a B.A. in theater and film from Fairfield University, and an M.F.A. in performance and interactive media arts from Brooklyn College. Over the pandemic, Mezzocchi founded Virtual Design Collective (VIDCO), which has aided in the development of over 50 new digital works over the last 18 months. This year, he is finishing his book, A Multimedia Designer’s Method to Theatrical Storytelling, which will be published through Routledge.
He grew up in New Hampshire, and returns every summer to serve as producing artistic director of Andy's Summer Playhouse, an innovative children’s theater producing original work by professional artists from across the country.
At MacDowell in 2017, he finished a draft of his theatrical multimedia script Playing For Life: Art Under Tyranny, which brought six survivors of oppressive societies together to create a new work based on Nathan The Wise, the first production of The Judische Kulturbund: a Jewish art community that was commissioned to make performances during the Holocaust. Mezzocchi used archival interviews and documentation of The Kulturbund matched with contemporary interviews of artists in similarly oppressive cultures today to form a whirling dervish of an immersive multimedia experience.
