Cooper Howell (they/them), originally from the middle of nowhere, Utah, is a New York City–based director, playwright, producer, and theater anarchist with one aim: to incite an audience revolution. Their work pursues that revolution by collapsing the distance between artist and audience, experiment and commerce, spectacle and community. Whether reimagining classics through emerging technology and contemporary social structures or building new work from the languages of social media, nightlife, and popular culture, Howell creates theater as event, giving a generation that can see anything from anywhere a must-see reason to show up in person.

Cooper made their Broadway debut as part of the Tony Award-winning directing team behind Cats: The Jellicle Ball at the Broadhurst Theatre, directed by Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch. Their relationship with the production began at its inception, performing as Rum Tum Tugger in its original workshop before joining the directing team and ultimately serving as Resident Director of the Broadway company. The experience—helping shepherd a radical theatrical experiment from an early idea through a Broadway run—has become foundational to how Cooper approaches making theater.

Their New York directing credits include Courting Mayhem at IRT Theater (Off-Broadway debut); Brent Weaver’s Oscar’s Razor at the 2026 SPARK New Work Festival; Baldwin et Lucien at New York City Center; J.C. Pankratz’s Little Kingdom at The Workshop Theater; AriDy Nox’s Death Comes in Threes at the 2025 Breaking the Binary Festival; and Black Girl in Paris: The Musical for NAMT in 2026. Regional credits include RENT at Utah Rep Theatre, A Streetcar Named Desire at Radical Hospitality, and The Color Purple at Wasatch Theatre Company.

As a playwright, Cooper co-created THE LOOP, an immersive adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde experienced entirely through wireless headphones as audiences travel with the story from encounter to encounter. Selected as runner-up from more than 500 submissions for NewFest’s 2025 Ryan Hudak LGBTQ+ Playwriting Award, THE LOOP is part of Cooper’s larger investigation into how theatrical form can fundamentally alter the relationship between an audience and a story. They are currently writing the book and directing a stage adaptation of Paul Brill’s concept album The Cost of Believing.

Cooper is the co-founder of WILDEHAUS, a New York production company that hunts unseen work by the country’s most exciting queer artists and gives it the visibility to break through. WILDEHAUS develops each work toward a script-in-hand theatrical soirée that puts artists face-to-face with industry and new audiences. Through WILDEHAUS, in 2026, Cooper produced and directed presentations of Manon McCullum’s Having a Crush Feels Like Cocaine and the Zakar Twins’ live comedy-sitcom Brother, Brother.

Cooper is an alum of National Queer Theater’s Artistic Collective and Theater Producers of Color’s 2025 cohort. Before moving primarily into directing and writing, they appeared in six Off-Broadway productions, including Emojiland as Smiling Face with Sunglasses, Spamilton: An American Parody as Lin-Manuel Miranda playing Hamilton, and Penelope: A New Musical at York Theatre Company.