Bio
Ellen Mimi Schlecht (you can call her Mimi!) is a New York City based theatre artist, arts educator, and communications professional whose work lives at the intersection of performance, politics, and community.
She is passionate about creating accessible arts education and programming that invites people of all ages and backgrounds into the creative process. Mimi currently serves as a teaching artist with Broadway Bound Kids, where she fosters creativity, confidence, and collaboration through theatre-making.
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In the past, she has taught with Ursuline Academy (her alma-mater), Delaware Theatre Company, & Delaware Children's Theater.
As both an artist and arts administrator, she aims to create work that not only entertains but also sparks dialogue about the political systems and social structures that shape our lives.
A graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Mimi holds a BFA in Drama, BA in Politics, and MA in Arts Politics. She trained at Playwrights Horizons Theater School and Atlantic Acting School, grounding her artistic practice in ensemble collaboration and political inquiry.
Her performance credits include Hamlet (Red Bull Theater, Shakespeare in Schools), Dinner with the Headmistress (The Tank), RENT (New Light Theater), and Holy Agony (Playwrights Horizons Downtown).
Originally from Wilmington, Delaware, her love for theatre began in local community productions—a foundation that continues to inspire her belief in theatre as a collective art form that belongs to everyone and exists all around in the day to day.
“Love the art in you, not you in the art.”
Artist Statement
I am a writer, director, actor, producer, and teaching artist. I practice my art through and as collage. The definition of who I am is messy.
I create within intersections. Between identities, disciplines, genres, and traditions. Where contradiction starts, my work begins.
I don’t smooth over contradictions, but shape the work around them. I let tension, disagreement, and contrast become the architecture of the piece. If a scene resists easy resolution, that resistance becomes part of the structure. If an idea or wondering disrupts the flow, I don’t erase it, but instead ask how it can live inside the piece.
Friction–between people, between traditions, between the unexpected and the unknown–isn’t a problem to be fixed. It’s material. It creates heat, pressure, and energy. Even when simply rubbing your hands together for heat (something your body needs), there is friction.
Friction reminds us that we are alive, and I want my work to live.
As a mixed race director, playwright, and actor, I live in the blur, the blue, the both/and. I’m drawn to places where dissonance hums: softness within struggle, disagreement with connection, inherited forms disrupted by invention. I don’t seek to solve tension but to let it sing.
My collaborative process is rooted in listening. My training in ethnodrama taught me to treat every room as a space for shared authorship; with actors, with audiences, with text.
I come from many theatrical homes: devised ensemble work, middle school musicals, large-scale productions, a no-budget play in an old black box theater. What stays the same across scale is my process: curiosity, conversation, and co-creation.
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My rehearsal room is a lab, a playground, a map of constellations. We throw a ball and toss ideas. We ask questions without rushing answers. We sculpt silence. We play with form. We fail out loud. And through all of it—we listen.
I guide conversations without commandeering them. I create scaffolds that others climb, or deconstruct, or dance around. When directing, I am of service—without disappearing. I lead with the belief that leadership is simply listening out loud. We are figuring it out together.
I build theatre as if I am building a new sky of stars. Each collaborator, including my audience members, play the role of those stars. Each play is a strange new constellation we chart together.
Each work begins with curiosity and a willingness to be changed.