About TN

GARY MATHEWS was born in Owensboro, Kentucky. After completing his B.A. degree in Classics from Harvard University (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa), he studied at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece, under the Charles Eliot Norton Fellowship from Harvard. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a recipient of the Regents Fellowship and won the McKay Latin Verse Translation Prize. Mr. Mathews began ballet training with Harold Garton at Richmond Ballet in California and then studied with Ronn Guidi at Oakland Ballet for five years. He has continued his ballet training at the Academy of Dance Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina for the last six years. He has performed in a production of Sophocles’ Antigone in the original Greek at UCLA and Stanford University. He began his study of noh performance with Richard Emmert in Tokyo and has continued with the Noh Training Project for the last four years, participating in numerous performances and demonstrations in the United States and Japan. Mr. Mathews made his debut as a choreographer at the 2001 Noh Training Project with a work, Chains, that combined the African-American gospel tradition with noh dance movement. In the same year he was invited by Richard Emmert to join Theatre Nohgaku, and currently serves as Secretary of the company. Mr. Mathews has taught Classics and Comparative Literature at Berkeley and San Francisco State University. Since 1997 he has taught Humanities at the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem. He is a member of numerous learned societies, including the American Philological Association, the American Comparative Literature Association and the Modern Language Association.