Ilana Toeplitz

Ilana Ransom Toeplitz (she/her) is an award-winning director, choreographer, and educator whose career sits at the intersection of Broadway, new musical development, musical comedy, and the next generation of musical theatre artists.

Her professional career spans Broadway, Off-Broadway, national and international tours, the Boston Pops, and leading regional theatres across the country, including the Huntington Theatre Company, Pittsburgh CLO, Signature Theatre (VA), Park Square Theatre, Lyric Stage of Boston, and Greater Boston Stage Company. She served as the SDC Foundation’s Mike Ockrent Directing Fellow on Casey Nicholaw’s Tony-nominated The Prom, and as Assistant Director on Leigh Silverman’s Tony-nominated Violet, starring Sutton Foster and Joshua Henry.

She has worked alongside artists including Stephen Sondheim, Susan Stroman, Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, Jeanine Tesori, Alan Cumming, Jason Alexander, Victoria Clark, and Jenn Colella. Directing highlights include Reefer Madness! at 54 Below and New World Stages, Something Rotten! at Lyric Stage of Boston, Little Shop of Horrors at Greater Boston Stage Company, and productions with the York Theatre Company, Keen Company, The Drama League, and New York Musical Festival.

Toeplitz’s greatest professional through-line is new work; she was the inaugural Leo Shull New Musicals Directing Fellow with The Drama League and went on to co-found and direct multiple new musicals through the New Musicals Lab at Christopher Newport University’s Ferguson Center for the Arts. Her work with new musicals has included collaborations from the earliest stages of creation through workshop, public reading, and production — including projects by Drew Gasparini, Stephen Kaplan, Michael Wartofsky, Natalie Tenenbaum, Gabriella Mirabella, Jessie Field, Lucy O’Brien, and others.

She has also worked directly with Stephen Sondheim on multiple projects, including Sondheim on Sondheim with the Boston Pops and the Off-Broadway revisal of Marry Me A Little.

At Emerson College, Toeplitz brings that professional experience into the studio. She is committed to training artists who can do more than execute someone else’s vision: artists who can think, collaborate, reexamine, create, adapt, and lead. Toeplitz wants her students to leave Emerson ready not just to reprise roles, but to originate them—to walk into a room prepared, curious, generous, and unapologetically themselves. Her guiding principle is straightforward: work hard and be kind.