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Breakfast with Bristol24/7: Nancy Medina
Nancy Medina breezes into Spicer & Cole, a breakfast spot a stone’s throw from her new office on King Street, and orders a flat white and porridge with berries.
It’s been nearly a year since the mother-of-two and longtime theatre director’s appointment as Bristol Old Vic’s new artistic director, but just a week since she has taken up the post full-time.
Nancy is now at the helm of the oldest working theatre in the English-speaking world after Tom Morris stepped down after 12 years in the role, praising his successor as a “visionary creative leader” and a director at the height of her powers.
is needed now More than ever
But Bristol Old Vic is a world away from her hometown of New York City, the place where her love for theatre and the arts was born.
Nancy Medina is the new artistic director at Bristol Old Vic – photo: Betty Woolerton
“Growing up, I didn’t actually know what theatre was,” she chuckles.
Nancy’s family, originally from Dominican Republic, aren’t the theatre-going types but are “very artsy, very musical, very cultural”.
“My Dad was a professional dancer and I think entertaining and performing was always a thing for us.”
It wasn’t until attending summer school that Nancy fully grasped the concept of theatre. “I remember I was really mad,” she says. “I was smart and didn’t need to take extra classes, but summer school was my mom’s way of getting free childcare.”
“Our English teacher was running a theatre class and he had us do The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. I played Amanda, the one that had alcohol issues, and when it was time to present in the auditorium and all our family and friends had come to see us, I overdid it completely.
“I really played up the drink thing and I was all over the place. I remember I kicked my foot up in the air, and my shoe went flying into the auditorium. Everybody was like ‘whoa’: it was the most exciting moment.
“I’m like: ‘What is this theatre thing? I like it, I’m gonna do more of it.’”
Nancy went on to high school that specialised in business, law, biotech and sports, playing every theatre role available. “It wasn’t even because I was good,” she says, with a smile. “I was just the lead in everything because nobody else wanted to do it.”
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In her teenage years, she developed an interest in film – “I wanted to be the Latin Martin Scorsese” – interned at a Broadway touring company and threw herself into youth theatre, starting to understand how to use comedy and politics to tell a story.
She says: “I had no way of realising when I was 16 or 17 what these experiences with theatre were doing for me, but I can look back now and understand. It wasn’t like I was trying to get a career in theatre, I was just loving it.”
“At the same time, it’s important to understand that I come from immigrant parents who always were expecting me to have a real job. My generation of my siblings, and my cousins were the first to go to university in our family. So that was a really, really big thing.”
She chose to go to Emerson College, an specialist arts university in Boston, Massachusetts, but later dropped out and went to Binghamton University in upstate New York.
“At Emerson College, I was one out of ten Latin students that year,” she remembers. “Only three of us were working class and the others were wealthy international students.
“It was the first time in my life that I didn’t feel like I belonged in the space and I didn’t know how to communicate. It was just a complete culture shock.”
Fast-forward to adulthood, Nancy’s theatre now largely centres on black and brown stories of self-worth and belonging. She has now lived in Bristol for 15 years, originally crossing the pond to follow her husband’s new job.
In the UK, her career as a theatre director has truly taken off, directing plays from Trouble in Mind at the National Theatre and Strange Fruit at the Bush to a revival of August Wilson’s Two Trains Running at the Royal and Derngate in Northampton in a co-production with English Touring Theatre.
Now working full-time as the artistic director of Bristol Old Vic, the New Yorker explains her vision for historic theatre, which centres on themes of community, belonging and a celebration of culture.
“Bristol Old Vic has a really great national reputation,” Nancy says. “It’s all about that building; about how old it is, about the beauty of its theatre.
“But as part of your civic duty as a cultural organisation, you have to have a presence in communities.
“Bristol is a segregated city by its very infrastructure. With the M32 cutting it through the middle, it’s hard for different neighbourhoods to connect. I think we have to find ways of doing that a little bit better with a theatre.”
Nancy’s first season features a lineup of plays aiming to “bring a lot of joy to people after the heaviness and sombreness of the pandemic”.
Main image: Lucy J Turner
Read next:
- Nancy Medina announced first season at Bristol Old Vic as new artistic director
- When the Lantern hall was the Little Theatre
- Exhibition shows how Bristol schoolchildren deal with statue of slave trader
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