Sarah Lacy Hamilton (she/her) is a director, educator, and intimacy choreographer focused on new plays with great heart that hold the comic and the tragic in the same breath. Based in Sewanee, TN, she is especially interested in creating theatre for and about rural communities in the American Southeast.
Sarah has directed and developed plays at SpaceCraft, First Take Co., and River & Rail Theatre Co. (Knoxville); Barking Legs Theater (Chattanooga); The Farm Theater (NYC); Upstart Productions, WaterTower Theater’s Out of the Loop Festival, and Frank’s Place at the Kalita Humphreys Theatre (Dallas); Healthy Oyster Collective (Iowa City), and Richmond Triangle Players’ So.Queer Festival (Richmond). As an assistant / associate director, she’s worked with the South Carolina New Play Festival (asst. to Sarna Lapine), the Prague Quadrennial (assoc. to Daniel Fine), and Undermain Theatre (asst. to Blake Hackler). Her work has also been seen in educational institutions including Sewanee | The University of the South, Wesleyan University, the University of Iowa, and Southern Methodist University.
Sarah co-founded House Party Theatre, an award-winning Dallas company dedicated to producing site-specific performances, increasing access for first-time theatre goers, and developing new work by Dallas playwrights. With HPT, Sarah directed and produced over twenty-five plays between 2015 - 2017. Her woman-led production of Julius Caesar with HPT was a TheaterJones Critic’s Pick.
Notable new play development credits include: directing the premiere production of Enid Graham’s How to Save Ourselves, directing the Dallas regional premieres of Ruby Rae Spiegel’s Dry Land and Carrie and Francine, directing Chris McCreary’s solo show Hot Nostalgia for stage and screen, development and direction of a staged reading of C. Meaker’s Gifts from God (O’Neill National Playwrights Conference Semifinalist), and assistant directing the South Carolina New Play Festival’s staged reading of The Dark Lady by Sophie Boyce and Veronica Mansour (Richard Rodgers Award, 2025).
As an intimacy choreographer, Sarah has trained with Theatrical Intimacy Education (TIE) and Intimacy Directors International (IDI). IC credits include: Pass Over and Unusual Tale (River & Rail Theatre Co.), Great Comet, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Big Love (Sewanee), and Macbeth and Almost, Maine (SC Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities).
Sarah is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Sewanee | The University of the South. She holds an MFA in Directing from the University of Iowa and a BFA in Theatre Studies with an emphasis in Directing from Southern Methodist University. She is an Educator Advocate with Theatrical Intimacy Education (TIE). Associate Member, SDC.
