Hugo Jon Sayles is very proud to be the Producing Artistic Director of Shadow Theatre Company.  He has been involved in the performing arts for more than thirty years as director, performer, choreographer, writer and teacher.

Hugo is a recipient of the Colorado Council of the Arts 1997 Fellowship for his play Voices From the Soul, and a 2002 finalist in the nationally renowned Jerome Fellowship with his play The Sisters, Sweetwater.

A member of the Shadow Theatre Company family since its inception, he has directed such productions as From Okra to Greens; the Marlowe Award winning My Children, My Africa! And the Denver Post Ovation Award winning Topdog/underdog. He has been seen performing in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Fences, Two Trains Running and The Life & Times of Ol' Alfred.  He has also co-written Sweet Corner Symphony & In Search of Eckstine: A Love Story with Jeffrey Nickelson; and this season he created An Evening with Nina.

Hugo has used his skills in dance, theatre & communications to work with youth at Colorado State University Family Action Center in the project Kaleidoscope, which uses theatre to explore value clarification in at-risk youth throughout the community.  Similarly, he has worked with Eulipion's Cultural Arts Center youth-at-risk program called PRISM- a summer youth employment program.

Since 1991, Hugo has been an Artist Facilitator with the Colorado Educational Theatre's Building Bridges and Play-Makers.  Hugo has also spent the past ten years working with the Aurora Fox summer youth theatre program, teen acting classes and has directed some of their summer youth productions.  Throughout the years, Hugo has been teaching special workshops in story-telling, playwrighting, theatrical dances and voice for actors.

At Shadow Theatre Company, Hugo has spent the last three season's working as the main director for Shadow's Youth Ensemble CRUNK (Creative Resources Uniting Neighborhood Kids)- a program for young performing artists who creatively come together with professional artists as well as other very talented young artists from various fields in the performing arts in order to create a show.