Lon Bumgarner

Owner & Acting, Directing and Screenwriting Instructor

For over thirty-five years, Lon has been a film and theatre producer, director, writer, and teacher.  He holds two Master of Fine Arts Degrees, one in Theatre Production from Virginia Commonwealth University and one in Film Production from the University of Southern California’s Cinema and Television Department (USC/CNTV) as well as graduate credits from study at the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, England. Since 1984 he has directed over 125 plays throughout the country from community theatre to Off-Broadway. Between 1984 and 1991 Lon founded and served as Artistic Director of the Charlotte Shakespeare Company (CSC), a non-profit theatre company dedicated to the presentation of admission-free professional performances which in addition to its home base in North Carolina toured from Michigan to Florida. His New York credits include productions of Barefoot in the Park, The Importance of Being Earnest, and The Friar and the Nurse; his other credits are too numerous to mention. Lon was named “Best Director” for five years and “Theatre Person of the Year” for two by Creative Loafing Magazine, and in 1989 was awarded one of the first “Excellence in English Awards” by the International English Speaking Union, presented to him in New York by HRH Prince Phillip.

His film and commercial credits include the direction and production of independent features as well as numerous short films starring, among others, Peter Gabriel and Charles Durning. While attending USC he was trained in film production at the Feature Production Department at 20th Century Fox in Los Angeles and has produced over 60 national and international commercials for such clients as Ford, Kawasaki, Paramount Parks, Stren, and Marriott.  His graduate film “Three Pages” was selected as one of USC/CNTV's best one hundred films on its 70th anniversary. Committed to the field of education and professional writing, he has served as a faculty member at four universities and is now the Assistant Professor of Acting at UNC/Charlotte where he is also a member of the Shakespeare in Action Centre. In 2007, Lon began duties as an instructor of the University’s “Shakespeare in England” course, which he co-teaches in both Stratford and London. For a decade he served as film and theatre critic/writer for the “Leader,” a weekly newspaper, as well as monthly columnist for “Charlotte Arts Magazine”. In 1999 the North Carolina Arts Council awarded him its highly competitive “Screenplay Fellowship Award” for his script “The Company You Keep”. In addition to FAST, he now teaches at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, Georgia State University, Agnes Scott University, and the International Baccalaureate Program.