When I was in kindergarten, I said my favorite food was an artichoke.
That was about the same time I fell in love with theatre.
I love artichokes because they are delicious sinister soft exquisite messy bristled fleshy fractal effortful...
You must remove leaf by leaf, by budding choke, scraping the meat, to get to the heart. I strive for everything I make to have a similar ethos.
I am most interested in what is contradictory (beautiful and horrific) and hyper-nuanced,
like artichokes, like people.
Riley Glick is a Brooklyn-based director, writer, and producer.
Above all else, she is obsessed with making theatre that makes us feel alive.
As a director, her work includes Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, I and You by Lauren Gunderson, Adelina Marinello’s new play The Good Girls, Leo Kurland’s new play Golemstein; or the Mid-Century Modern Jewish Prométhée, and her own new work, Blood Orange Accounts, all at Northwestern University. She has also served as Assistant Director to Polly Duncan with Sarah Ruhl at The Poetry Foundation and Nate Cohen at Chicago’s Raven Theatre. She is committed to leading a rigorous yet playful room, excavating the beauty, the darkness, and the truth of any story.
As a lyricist, Riley works alongside collaborators Kyu Park and Danielle Llevada, who altogether develop new, innovative musicals. Their first piece, Last Song On Earth, was recently presented at The Tank in New York City and 7 Stages Theatre in Atlanta within the 2025 SheATL Theatre Festival. Last Song On Earth was nominated for Broadway World’s Best New Musical Off-Off Broadway Award and a semi-finalist for Live & In Color’s new musical incubator. Check out our Instagram here! Glick, Park, and Llevada’s work has also been heard at 54 Below and The Paradise Factory.
As a playwright, Riley has created full-length plays Blood Orange Accounts (Wirtz Center for the Performing Arts) and The Bug Collector, as well as 10-minute play Out of Nowhere, selected for Vertigo Productions’ 10-Minute Play Festival. She is devoted to building worlds with complex female and queer characters that expand our understanding of the world and/or the self.
As a producer, Riley is invested in realizing projects that reinvent form or pose unanswerable questions. Currently, she is an Assistant Producer for StoryCourse, founded by Adam Kantor, Benj Pasek, and Brian Bordainick. Their current production, Diaspora, created by Adam Kantor and Charly Jaffe, is an immersive, four-course dinner experience that brings to life four Jewish chefs’ journeys from Iran, Ethiopia, Ukraine, and Mexico to New York City. She is also currently developing a collaborative project between Chicago-based Lookingglass Theatre Company and Cambodia-based Phare Ponleu Selpak, to be announced soon.
Outside of theatre, she can be found backpacking a new country, browsing a local bookstore, or organizing her restaurant list...again.
“According to the artichoke theory, man had some inner essence, or “heart”; according to the onion theory, once you had unwrapped all the layers of society off of man, there was nothing there.”
–Elif Batuman, The Idiot