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Michael Patrick Thornton
Director
Artistic director/co-founder of The Gift Theatre Company, Thornton recently directed John Conroy’s My Kind of Town for Steppenwolf’s First Look Festival as well as Of Mice and Men at Steppenwolf. In addition to his several directing credits with The Gift he has directed We’ve Got Our Own Problems, Natural Gas, and Best of Second City Directors’ Showcase at Second City, Picasso At The Lapin Agile (Noble Fool), Julius Caesar (Crew Of Patches), among others. Thornton was also an assistant director on Steppenwolf’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning August: Osage County. A Jeff Award-winning actor, Thornton most recently appeared in Natural Gas, The Ruby Sunrise, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (The Gift), and Steppenwolf’s The Elephant Man. He is a graduate of The School at Steppenwolf, The Conservatory Program and Directing Program at Second City, and is finishing the iO Improv Program. He also teaches at Second City and The School at Steppenwolf. As a playwright, Thornton’s play, The Princess and the Bear, was published in excerpt by Third Coast Press and is being workshopped for production through a grant from The Second City Foundation. He has received numerous awards including Chicago Finalist: National Shakespeare Contest (Mitzi-Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center, New York), Northlight’s Jack Springer Award for Outstanding Performance, The 2008 Tim Meier & Helen Coburn Meier Foundation Achievement Award, The Second City Foundation’s 2009 Jim Zulevic Chicago Arts Award, and The Joseph Jefferson Award for Solo Performance. This fall, Thornton can be seen playing Dr. Gabriel Fife on ABC’s Private Practice.
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