April E. Brassard is an award-winning writer, producer, director, performer, musician, artist, athlete, and professor, who has lived and worked in Hollywood, New York, and DC. 26/27 will mark April's third school year as a faculty member in the Department of Performing Arts here at Georgetown, where she is an Engelhard Program Fellow and TLISI presenter. April and Dr. Bill Rebeck are Directors and Producers of "Heart of the Harvey" Medical Humanities Performing Arts Festival at the School of Medicine, a festival celebrating the role of the arts and empathy in medicine, which brings together students, faculty and staff from all areas of Georgetown (CAS, Medicine, Law, Capitol Campus, etc.) for one incredible night of community. The festival ran this past April with 182 audience members and17 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 was awarded the Cawley Faculty Career Champions Award because of one of her amazing students.
The only child of scientists, she was predestined for a career in medicine, until an esteemed pre-med program went awry and chronic illness decimated her life, catalyzing her to pivot paths. After becoming a background actor on the hit WB television series Dawson’s Creek, she fell in love with the performing arts. April earned her MFA at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, then moved to Hollywood to work with Team Downey (Robert Downey, Jr.), Warner Bros. Studios, CBS Studios, Disney-ABC Studios, and CBS Studios, where she wrote and produced episodes of primetime television. She then delved into development, writing four original series with Archie Comics (Warner Bros.), Two Shakes Entertainment (Damon Wayans, Jr., CBS Studios), Lucid Road (Aaron Paul, HBO Max), and Tornante (Michael Eisner, Universal). 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.
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 of their new works festival for four years. April won the Robert K. Purks Faculty Enrichment Grant from the College of Visual and Performing Arts, which she utilized in theatrical production, 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 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 can be found here:
www.heartoftheharvey.com
Heart of the Harvey Performers Explore ‘the Art of Medicine and the Medicine of Art’
Praise for ORLANDO can be found here:
‘Orlando’ takes a gender trip through time at Georgetown University