Over 30 Million Viewers have tuned-in to April E. Brassard's Primetime Network Television Writing, and she has worked on over 100 episodes of Primetime Television. April is an internationally award-winning theater, film, and television writer, producer, director, performer, musician, artist, athlete, and professor. This will be April's 8th year as a university professor, as she enters her third school year at Georgetown in the Department of Performing Arts, after spending five years as a professor at the School of Theater at George Mason University. She is thrilled to meet her next cohort of incredible students!!!! At Georgetown, April is an Engelhard Program Fellow and a Presenter for the Teaching, Learning & Innovation Summer Institute. April and Dr. Bill Rebeck are Directors and Producers of the HEART OF THE HARVEY Festival of Performing Arts & Medicine at the School of Medicine, a festival celebrating the role of the arts and empathy in medicine, which brings together students, faculty, staff, and alumni from the Georgetown University School of Medicine, the College of Arts & Sciences, the School of Health, the Berkley School of Nursing, the McDonough School of Business, the Walsh School of Foreign Service, the McCourt School of Public Policy, the Georgetown School of Continuing Studies, and the GMUC, Capitol, and Hilltop Campuses for one incredible night of community. It is a deeply unifying event filled with empathy, laughter, and love!!! The festival ran this past April with 182 audience members and 17 performances (theater, music, dance, poetry, prose, and film) and will return in April of 2027. In 2025, April was the Director of the critically acclaimed Main Stage production of ORLANDO by Sarah Ruhl in the Gonda Theater, and she was awarded the Cawley Faculty Career Champions Award at Georgetown.
She is not simply a voyeur peering from the stage into the medical field: April was almost a surgeon. The only child of EPA senior scientists she was predestined for a career in the sciences. After having three rotator cuff surgeries herself from her Junior Olympic USA Swimming training, she became a pre-med student, interning with a renowned NHL and NBA orthopedic surgeon in DC. After taking part in an epidemiological study in Richmond that went catastrophically awry, chronic illness systematically decimated every system in her body, leaving her permanently disabled. Rejecting the idea of working in the hospitals she practically lived in, she pivoted to the arts for escapism, becoming a background actor on DAWSON’S CREEK, then earned her MFA at TISCH SCHOOL OF THE ARTS AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, studying Dramatic Writing, Film and Television Production, and Animation at the MAURICE KANBAR INSTITUTE OF FILM & TELEVISION. She moved to Hollywood, where she wrote and worked on primetime television and films at: ROBERT DOWNEY, JR., TEAM DOWNEY; THE BIG BANG THEORY & MOM, WARNER BROS. STUDIOS; SCORPION, CBS STUDIOS; and NYPD BLUE, DISNEY-ABC STUDIOS. She then delved into development, writing four original series with: ARCHIE COMICS, WARNER BROS. STUDIOS; DAMON WAYANS, JR., TWO SHAKES ENTERTAINMENT, CBS STUDIOS; AARON PAUL, LUCID ROAD, HBO MAX; and MICHAEL EISNER, TORNANTE, UNIVERSAL STUDIOS. She then wrote and produced I WAS A STRANGER, a six-time internationally award-winning short film with stars from Marvel and Netflix. She has also written and produced ten plays, including two “five-star,” “must-see,” sold-out productions at the Capital Fringe Festival, one of which saw her in the starring role. Every play, television series, and film she has ever written has themes of social justice and medical advocacy.
April moved from LA to DC after her father had a heart transplant at the start of the pandemic, becoming a professor at the School of Theater at George Mason University for five years, in addition to serving as Director and Producer of their new works festival for five years. April won the Robert K. Purks Faculty Enrichment Grant from the College of Visual and Performing Arts, which she utilized in theatrical production with her students at the Capital Fringe Festival, before transitioning to her role at Georgetown. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild, Women in Film, the American Film Institute, Theater Communications Group, Southeastern Theater Conference, Writers Guild of America, the Organization of American Historians, and Pi Beta Phi Sorority. April was a USA, NVSL, and VHSL swimming coach for 13 years, and won the President’s Silver Service Medal for her work volunteering at Hidden Oaks Nature Center and the Fairfax County Park Authority, and the INOVA Hospital Auxiliary. April strives to speak for the silenced through her art and hopes to educate and enrich the lives of the next generation.
More Information about HEART OF THE HARVEY:
www.heartoftheharvey.com
Heart of the Harvey Performers Explore ‘the Art of Medicine and the Medicine of Art’
Praise for ORLANDO:
‘Orlando’ takes a gender trip through time at Georgetown University
Academic Appointment(s)
- Primary
- Adjunct Lecturer, College - Department of Performing Arts