Amber Mak is a freelance Director, Choreographer, Producer, Dramaturg, Educator and Coach based out of the Chicagoland area.
Collaboration is at the heart of every process and relationship she enters into when creating a theatrical work or teaching a class. She loves stories and creating a shared experience for artists and audiences to connect together, for she believes that it is through these connections that transformative relationships can emerge and authentic community is created. She truly believes shared experiences connect us and remind us of our humanity and have incredible power to inspire.
She was lucky enough to begin her professional career 23 years ago as a Sophomore at Northwestern University in the ensemble of The Wizard of Oz at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. When she was in the 2nd grade she proclaimed she wanted to be a “coreografer” when she grew up and after performing professionally for about 15 years all over the United States, she started to make the transition to the creative team side.
Since 2009, she has been directing and choreographing including assisting Susan Stroman on the 2013 Broadway production of Big Fish. She was the founding artistic director of FWD Theatre Project in Chicago, an incubator dedicated to developing new musicals by producing readings in site appropriate spaces in which she had the honor of working with Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boublil, the writers of Les Miserables.
She was the Artistic Producer and New Works Director for the Paramount Theatre in Aurora from 2016 to 2022. During her tenure there, she also directed and performed many of their award winning holiday shows that drew over 80,000 audience members each season. She also helped to produce 3 world premieres for the theatre.
She is a fierce feminist, championing other female creative voices and prides herself in helping to mentor the next generation of theatre creators. As many of her projects have centered around the family friendly audience and iconic fairytale stories, she takes incredible care in making those stories accessible for each generation of audience sharing that experience. She is also an advocate for working parent artists, as her most proud productions to date are her two young children. She hopes she can be an agent of change in working industry standards so that more women and parents feel they have a choice in remaining in the industry as a creator.
