Associate Professor This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Office Location: ASC 283
(205) 527-4609
Research and Teaching Interests: Playwriting, Screenwriting, Audio Drama, the Power of Narrative to Effect Personal Behavior and Social Change
Office Hours: By appointment
Education:
- B.A., UAB, Theatre with Honors
- MFA, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Theatre
Lee is a writer for stage, screen, and radio with more than 200 produced scripts to his credit. He has written for network, cable, syndicated, and web-based drama series and created more than two dozen original full-length works for the stage.
As a playwright, his best-known script is probably Holmes & Watson, which was produced off-Broadway in 1990 with Lee in the role of Sherlock Holmes. His adaptation of Karel Čapek's 1920 play R.U.R. ran off-Broadway in 2013. Both plays were premiered at Theatre UAB.
As an Associate Professor in our Department, Lee teaches a variety of creative writing courses. Instrumental in creating UAB’s film program, Lee has successfully moved all of our scriptwriting courses online, where more students can be taught in each semester than ever before.
Lee has produced our immensely popular Festival of Ten-Minute Plays since its inception in 2003. The Festival features scripts created in his playwriting classes and then expanded, edited, and polished over the following year. The result has been more than 100 entirely new and original short plays, often performed for standing-room-only audiences.
Many of our touring productions for young audiences feature Lee's adaptations of works of literature, such as The Amazing Traveling Aesop Show, The Thousand and One Nights, The Ransom of Red Chief, The Legend of Robin Hood, and The Emperor’s New Clothes. Lee's adaption of Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer has gone on to be his most widely-produced work, with more than a hundred performances since its premiere at UAB.
Radio drama has long been a passion of Lee's, and he channeled that love as Head Writer and Post-Production Supervisor for UAB's four-year-long radio drama serial Bodylove and its sequel Keeping Up with the Walkers. Since then he has collaborated with the UAB School of Public Health and inmates at the Donaldson Correctional Facility to create the radio drama series Corrections. All three of these series used character-based drama as a means of teaching audiences about healthy behaviors related to diabetes, high blood pressure, and other risk factors of being overweight. Lee currently writes and stars in the science fiction radio-drama serial Relativity.
Lee is well-known to UAB's Deans, Provost, and President as the Announcer for UAB's Doctoral Hooding Ceremonies. Twice a year, Lee introduces candidates for a Doctoral degree with correct pronunciation of each name and of each often-complex dissertation title.
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Recent Courses
- Screenwriting I
- Screenwriting II
- Playwriting
- Theatre Appreciation
- Introduction to Cinema
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Select Publications
- Real Characters: The psychology of parasocial relationships with media characters (Chapter: "The Doctor Changes but the Feelings Stay the Same")
- Setting the Stage for Social Change: Using Live Theater to Dispel Myths About Intimate Partner Violence
- Autopsy of a Living Subject: Fundamentals of Analysis of Dramatic Literature for Actors, Directors, and Designers
- Holmes & Watson: a play by Lee Shackleford )
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Academic Distinctions and Professional Societies
- Chair of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival National Playwriting Project, 2017
- Full Member, Dramatists Guild
- Links
