Based out of Southern Oregon, Tommy Statler recently completed his Master of Fine Arts Degree at Cal State-Fullerton. After spending 11 years in the Los Angeles area, he is excited to meet and build a new community in the Rogue Valley and beyond.
Tommy is originally from Missouri but graduated high school in Twentynine Palms, California. He began his college career as a journalism major at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He then transferred to Southeast Missouri State University and became an acting major.
Following his graduation from SEMO in December 2009, Tommy produced and directed non-equity shows in Los Angeles. He produced and acted for a bar-room Shakespeare company in Los Angeles called Backroom Shakespeare. He spent two summers working with the education department as a teaching artist in performing, Shakespeare history, and voice/text at California Shakespeare Theatre in the Bay Area. Tommy has also held directing internships with Berkshire Theatre Group and Santa Cruz Shakespeare.
Tommy has worked as an independent teaching artist with The Help Group, a charter school program in the Los Angeles area. The Help Group hired him as a substitute teacher and classroom aide for students on the autism spectrum. With the support of The Help Group, Tommy started a drama class for high school-age special needs students. He designed the curriculum to focus on using acting exercises and lessons to teach social skills. In 2017 The Help Group produced its first Shakespeare play, Macbeth. The play was edited to 45 minutes and featured every student in the classroom with a speaking part.
In 2017 he founded Trashcan Shakespeare; a company that put up one-night-only bar-room shows of Shakespeare plays with no rehearsal. Actors learned their lines on their own time, or sometimes they didn’t, and then the show continued. Trashcan Shakespeare ran for two seasons producing 19 Shakespeare and 3 Greek plays while bringing in over 100 different actors to play the parts. Guests were invited to drink and be rowdy during the shows and encouraged to bring out their phones for pictures so long as they used the hashtag #trashcanshakes. All proceeds from Trashcan were donated to Youth Emerging Stronger to benefit homeless youth in the Los Angeles area.
From the fall of 2018 to May of 2022, he attended graduate school at California State University - Fullerton. During the pandemic he took a year off from his studies until audiences could be back in theatres. During his time at CSUF, he directed two main stage productions, two plays lost due to the pandemic, two workshop productions, five class study scenes, and two scenes for presentation at KCACTF (appearing once as a finalist).
