Paul O’Mahony is a director, actor, and writer based in the UK. He is the artistic director of the multi award- winning theater company Out of Chaos, whose work has been performed across the world. For Out of Chaos, Paul has devised, written and performed Out of Chaos, Unmythable, and Norsesome and played leading roles in their touring productions of Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hippolytus. Other acting credits include productions with the Royal Shakespeare Company, English Touring Opera and The Orange Tree Theatre. His translations of Greek tragedy have been performed at the Barbican in London and he has extensive experience as a director and performer in the UK and the US. His directing credits include Unmythable, The Suppliants, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Problem With the Seventh Year.

Paul has worked extensively in outreach, running subject workshops and social engagement classes in hundreds of UK schools with his company Living Learning. He is the Community Director of The Playground Theatre in west London, leading an award winning program of work which encompasses (along with many other projects) play reading groups in mental health referral units, arts workshops with marginalised groups and extensive engagement with the community which experienced the Grenfell Tower in London in 2016.

In response to the first lockdowns of 2020, Paul collaborated with Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies (CHS) to create Reading Greek Tragedy Online, a landmark series which brought together 120 artists from around the world, along with academics and audiences, to perform and discuss every extant Greek tragedy in a weekly live stream over 40 consecutive weeks. The series has garnered more than 300,000 views online and is now embedded in multiple syllabuses in the US. There was significant accompanying outreach with over 1000 students creating their own performances inspired by Greek tragedy through the Playing Medea, Playing Antigone and Playing Dionysus.

The enormous artistic and pedagogical success of this series has led to collaborations in the US and Greece, with residencies at UIUC, Brandeis, Harvard, Emory and UT Austin. His work at UIUC started with an interactive online performance of Aeschylus’s Suppliants and was followed in 2022 by a public reading of Xtigone as a powerful means to explore the effect of gun violence in the community. In 2023, Paul returned to Champaign to work with students and community groups on a reading of Electricidad to highlight issues connected to systemic racism.

His work has been supported by the Society for Classical Studies (grants in 2020, 2021 and 2023), The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities and the Classical Association. He is a frequent collaborator with the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford University. He is the Course Director (and creator) of the British American Drama Academy’s Greek Theatre Program, a unique summer course which combines theory and practice with leading academics and theatre practitioners in the UK and Greece.

He was an Associate in Hellenic Studies at The CHS from 2020-2023 and continues to work with their teams in Washington DC and Nafplio, Greece. With Joel Christensen, Professor of Classics at Brandeis University, he is creating a stage adaptation of Iliad 6, and he is also developing a musical inspired by the origins of the ancient Olympics. Paul studied Literae Humaniores at the University of Oxford where he was an Ancient History Scholar and twice winner of the Cawkwell Prize.

Eminent Artist in Residence, University of Wyoming, 2015. Associate in Hellenic Studies, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2020-2023. Presenter at SCS Conference, 2021.

Harry Ransom Center Fellowship in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin, 2025

Publication (with Joel Christensen): “Finding Catharsis in the Pandemic: Reading Greek Tragedy Online” Pandemic Play: Community in Performance, Gaming, & the Arts. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.