The International Shakespeare Center (ISC) is dedicated to making Santa Fe a destination for world-class Shakespeare. We support performances, provide education for people of all ages, and create opportunities for people to meet in community to read and discuss Shakespeare.

The ISC believes Santa Fe is able to sustain a permanent state-of-the-art Shakespeare center that includes a theater with an Elizabethan thrust stage, a black box theater, gift shop, lecture hall, community rooms, administrative offices, court yard, commons area, and even a tavern—a center that will draw not only our vibrant Shakespeare community in town, but tourists and theatrical artists from all over the world. It will also act as a focal point to elevate local talent and a training center to create a professional repertory company.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is a small, out-of-the-way town in southern Oregon with a population of 20,000, yet now sells close to 400,000 tickets a year and has a full-time staff of 750. Other small towns such as Cedar City, Utah, and Stratford, Ontario, show how theater, including Shakespeare theater, can not only survive but illuminate everything else a town has to offer.

Santa Fe begins with advantages that none of the other Shakespeare centers could claim: an active arts culture, a thriving visitor population, and a city known as a destination point for world-class visual and performing arts. We can make Santa Fe a dynamic destination for Shakespeare.

Our Partnership

The International Shakespeare Center (ISC) produced Ducdame Ensemble’s DAMES OF THRONES: THE WOMEN OF SHAKESPEARE’S HISTORIES, at Santa Fe’s Adobe Rose Theatre this February.  Ducdame Ensemble Director Ariana Karp lead a fourteen-member cast of mostly women in scenes from Shakespeare’s King John, Richard II, Henry IV Parts I & II, Henry VI, and Richard III. Watch for their first performance in Santa Fe, Dames of Thrones: Women in Shakespeare’s Histories. 

DAMES OF THRONES was part of a month-long celebration of Shakespeare sparked by the New Mexico Museum of Art exhibit The First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.