Amy Altadonna
Undergraduate Program Director and Senior Lecturer in Sound Design and Technology
B.A. College of William and Mary
M.F.A. Yale School of Drama
Amy has enjoyed a two-decade career as a sound designer, collaborating on a wide variety of fascinating projects. As an Artistic Associate with Brooklyn’s Colt Coeur theatre company, Amy has designed the world premieres of Eureka Day with Tina Benko (Walkerspace), Joan starring Johanna Day (HERE Arts Center), Cal in Camo with David Harbour and Paul Wesley (Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre), Ruby Rae Speigel’s Dry Land, Steven Levenson’s Seven Minutes in Heaven, Everything is Ours (HERE Arts Center) and Recall (Wild Project) with artistic director Adrienne Campbell-Holt and her fellow company artists. Other memorable credits include All’s Well That Ends Well (Oregon Shakespeare Festival), the regional premieres of Red Velvet and Ugly Lies the Bone, as well as King Lear (staring Christopher Lloyd), 4,000 Miles, The Creditors, The Children, Merry Wives of Windsor, God of Carnage and many others at Shakespeare & Company. She designed How I Learned to Drive (Round House, MD), Our Town (Alabama Shakespeare Festival), Don’t You F**king Say A Word directed by Lee Sunday Evans (59E59), Milk (New Georges NYC), Private Lives, The Secret Garden, and Foxfire (Utah Shakespearean Festival), Death of a Salesman, Fences, The Other Place, and Jacqueline Lawton’s The Hampton Years (Virginia Stage Company), Skin of Our Teeth, Treasure Island, and Peter and the Starcatcher (Perseverance Theatre, AK), Uncle Vanya (Bard Summerscape), and The Unmentionables (Yale Rep) with Tony Award winning director Anna Shapiro.
Many of her other favorite productions have been at universities, including The Last Days of Judas Iscariot at Yale (another collaboration with Adrienne Campbell-Holt), The Who's Tommy, Orpheus Descending, Guys and Dolls and Spelling Bee at American University, and Medea, The Seagull and Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice at Columbia University. She has done location recording, original music, and post production sound on film and video projects including work for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the feature films Salesgirl, Perfect Wedding, and Mandatory Love, and the shorts 2:15, Amadi Comes Home, and Yield, which was screened at the Leviathan Lab Short Film Initiative at Lincoln Center and the 2014 Planet Connections Film Festival.
For three years, she served on the executive board of TSDCA (Theatre Sound Designers and Composers Association), on the Sound Commission of USITT as the Chair of Diversity, and has adjudicated regional and national Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival design competitions.
She received her BA in Music from The College of William and Mary — where she studied composition with Dan Gutwein and Sophia Sergi — and her Masters Degree in Sound Design from the Yale School of Drama. She was most recently the adjunct lecturer of Live Sound at American University; previously, she was Instructor of Sound Design at the Professional Performing Arts School (Manhattan). She was also a Guest Lecturer at Columbia University and presented a masterclass at Yale. She loves her family, pet rats, and being a mom.