Joanne Gordon is an award-winning director whose accolades include five Drama-Logue Awards, a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award, the Polly Warfield Award, and a Women in Theatre Red Carpet Award. Joanne is also an internationally renowned Sondheim scholar who has directed many Sondheim works worldwide, including the first Chinese-language production of West Side Story in Beijing. Other directing highlights include S/he and Me (conceived for Alexandra Billings); Indecent (named best of the year by both of Saint Louis's major newspapers); The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?; Disgraced; How I Learned to Drive; Evita; and Next to Normal. She is the author of Art Isn't Easy: The Theater of Stephen Sondheim and Stephen Sondheim: A Casebook, and she contributed to The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies and the Sondheim Review. Gordon is equally well known for her dramatizations of the work of Charles Bukowski. She received her PhD from UCLA.