Meet the Director: Oz Scott
Legendary award-winning television, motion picture, and theatrical director Oz Scott returns to the stage to direct ATC’s Intimate Apparel. Scott has nearly five decades of experience directing hundreds of television episodes along with dozens of stage productions, made-for-TV movies, and motion pictures.
Oz Scott is an award-winning entertainment industry veteran and highly sought after director whose notable work includes hundreds of television episodes along with dozens of stage productions, made-for-TV movies, and motion pictures. One of the best in his field for nearly five decades, Scott has directed and produced Kingdom Business, Sacrifice, The District, and Black Lightning. He has directed episodes of S.W.A.T., Chicago Med, Gotham, Scream: The TV Series, ABC’s Boston Legal, The Practice, Wonderland; NBC’s Medium, American Dreams, and Ed, CSI NY, C.S.I., Num3ers, The Unit, The Guardian, Family Law, The District, JAG, and American Gothic; and FOX’s Ally McBeal and Party of Five. Cable projects Soul Food (Showtime), Any Day Now (Lifetime), and the extremely popular movie The Cheetah Girls on The Disney Channel. Early TV projects included The Cosby Show, Northern Exposure, Chicago Hope, Picket Fences, LA Law, Diagnosis Murder, Hill Street Blues, Fame, Dirty Dancing, 227, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Gimme A Break, and many others.
In 2002, Scott directed one of VH1’s highest-rated programs, the original motion picture Play’d – A Hip Hop Story. Other movie credits include Tears and Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story (1994), Spanish Judges (1999) featuring Vincent D’Onofrio and Matthew Lillard, and the renowned comedy smash hit Bustin’ Loose (1981) starring Richard Pryor and Cicely Tyson.
This year Scott produced two films for TUBI and Village Roadshow The award-winning Cinnamon and Murder City
Scott’s professional theatrical career began at Arena Stage and then New York, where he eventually staged and took to Broadway the widely acclaimed play for colored girls who considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange. He directed Ntozake Shange’s original productions of Spell #7 and Where The Mississippi Meets the Amazon. Other regional theatre projects include The Ballad of Emmett Till (Goodman), From the Mississippi Delta (Cincinnati Playhouse), and Fences (Asolo Theater). He directed Resurrection at Arena Stage and Hartford Stage, and then restaged it for Philadelphia Theater Company. He also directed writer Daniel Beaty in a one-man production of Resurrection. Other one-actor projects include Saundra McClain’s one-woman play Barbara Jordan: A Rendezvous with Destiny and Ralph Harris’ one-man play Mannish Boy.
Traveling to Russia with The Old Settler for the O’Neill, Scott directed both an American cast as well as a Russian cast in a Russian translation. At the O’Neill, he worked on close to two dozen new plays featuring some of the most talented writers in the theater. Scott for a period was named Artistic Director of the Eugene O’Neill Film and Television Screenwriting Conference, which focused on writers in transition; playwrights, novelists, poets, and songwriters moving from one medium into film and TV.
Scott received an NAACP Image Award, the Drama Desk Award, a Village Voice OBIE Awards for Off Broadway, a Genesis Award, and the Nancy Susan Reynolds Award. He is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (MFA).