Scott Palmer (B.S., MAIS) is a native of the Pacific Northwest with more than 25 years’ experience as a theatre director, adaptor of classical work, playwright and a development and philanthropy executive.  

He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Oregon, his master’s degree from Oregon State University, and studied for his PhD in Contemporary Theatre Practice at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

Scott has a breadth of experience in the non-profit world, including as the Founder of Bard in the Botanics, Scotland’s only dedicated Shakespeare producing theatre, founder of Bard in The Quad, Oregon State University’s annual outdoor Shakespeare festival, and as the Founding Artistic Director of Bag&Baggage Productions, a professional theatre in Hillsboro, Oregon. His work has taken him across the globe, including here in the United States, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand.  

As a theatre director, Scott is perhaps best known for his work with Elizabethan, Jacobean and Restoration-era dramatic works. For example, Scott has directed productions of Dryden and Davenant’s The Tempest, or the Enchanted Isle (a Restoration-era adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest), The Students (an adaptation of Love’s Labour’s Lost by an anonymous writer from 1762), and John Dennis’ 1702 adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor called The Amorous Adventures of the Comical Knight Sir John Falstaff, among many other lost or rarely performed works of the period.

Scott has also developed an international reputation for his own unique adaptations of Shakespeare, many of which use the original source materials Shakespeare himself used when writing his plays and then incorporating those source materials back into the scripts. For example, Scott’s adaptation of King Lear relies on text from The True Chronicle History of King Leir and His Three Daughters from 1605, Holinshed’s Chronicles from 1577, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen from 1590 and The Mirror For Magistrates from 1559.

Scott has employed this unique approach to adapting Shakespeare’s work in no less than 20 original adaptations of his own, ranging from As You Like It, Antony and Cleopatra, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Richard III, Henry V and The Taming of the Shrew. Scott was also the very first person in history to combine Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew with John Fletcher’s sequel, The Woman’s Prize, into a single performance.

More recently, Scott has developed a reputation for excellence in directing small-cast contemporary works, including The Niceties by Eleanor Burgess, The Last White Man by Bill Cain, and Apples In Winter by Jennifer Fawcett, among others.

Scott also has a long and successfully history of working with, and for, public sector departments and with foundations and trusts. He served as a member of the Hillsboro Arts and Culture Council, and on a range of City of Hillsboro advisory boards (including Urban Renewal, City Arts Planning boards, tourism agencies, and as a member of the Hillsboro Public Library Board of Directors). Scott also served as a member of the grant review panel for the Oregon Arts Commission and the Regional Arts and Culture Council multiple times over a dozen years, and has a long history of successful grant administration with funders such as the Miller Foundation, the Meyer Memorial Trust, the Schubert Foundation, the American Theatre Wing, the Collins Foundation, and the Oregon Community Foundation, to name just a few.

Scott also served as the Producing Artistic Director of Company of Fools, an Equity theatre in Sun Valley, Idaho, and as the Executive Director of the Crested Butte Center for the Arts in Colorado.

Scott is married to Brian Palmer, an author, and they live in Hillsboro, Oregon with their dog Mac (named after the Scottish play) and near their families.