Nadia Fall announced as new artistic director of the Young Vic

The Young Vic Theatre has announced Nadia Fall, currently artistic director of Theatre Royal Stratford East, as its new artistic director and joint chief executive. She will join the organisation in January 2025, succeeding current artistic director Kwame Kwei-Armah. Fall will lead the theatre alongside executive director Lucy Davies, who will also become joint chief executive.

Nadia Fall has been the artistic director of Stratford East since 2017 and was an associate at the National Theatre from 2015 to 2018. Her debut feature film, Brides, is in post-production and was featured at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival on the Great8 platform of British films.

At Stratford East, Fall’s programming highlights include a revival of Equus, which transferred to the West End, King Hedley II starring Lenny Henry, and a large-scale production of Noye’s Fludde in collaboration with the English National Opera, which won the Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Opera.

Her National Theatre work includes writing and directing HOME, directing Chewing Gum Dreams by Michaela Coel, The Suicide, Our Country’s Good, and DARA. In 2019, she returned to direct Inua Ellams’ adaptation of Three Sisters.

She said today: “The Young Vic was first built as a pop-up theatre for a younger, bolder generation of artists and audiences. Today it is a celebrated cornerstone of London theatre but that mischievous spirit of a makeshift, anti-establishment theatre still courses through its veins, and I find that incredibly compelling. The Young Vic is not afraid to ask the difficult questions, and it’s particularly exciting to me that its audiences have an appetite for that provocation.

“I was born in Southwark and raised in and around the borough as well as the Middle East, to South Asian parents, and I love that the Young Vic holds hands with its local community of Southwark and Lambeth whilst looking out towards the rest of the world through its artists and stories. It’s exactly who we are in London – both local and international.

“I am thrilled to be leading the team at a theatre where I was first taken into the fold as a young student director when associate artistic director Sue Emmas watched the first night of the very first show I ever directed in a pub theatre in Kennington. It’s one of life’s full circle moments and I cannot wait to get started.”