Dr. Allen J. Kuharski is Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scholar in the Department of Theater at Swarthmore College outside Philadelphia, where he taught directing, theater history, and performance theory for 32 years.  Prominent among his former students are the founders of Philadelphia’s Pig Iron Theater Company, which is celebrating its 30^th anniversary in 2025.  Since 2012, he has also taught part-time in the MFA Program in Devised Performance at the Pig Iron School/Rowen University (Philadelphia/Glassboro, New Jersey).  Since 2022, he has taught annually in Beijing and Shanghai, China.  Originally trained as a set designer, he has also worked as a director, performance curator, dramaturge, translator, editor, and critic. 

He founded and for 20 years chaired the Department of Theater at Swarthmore.  Since 1981, Kuharski has regularly studied, researched, and worked in Poland, where he was twice a Fulbright Scholar in theater and recently directed a devised movement theater piece titled Bezkresy (Unbounded) with graduating MFA students in the Dance Theatre Department of the Karol Szymanowski School of Music in Katowice.  At the University of California at Berkeley, Kuharski wrote the first dissertation in any language devoted to the theatrical work of the modern Polish playwright and novelist Witold Gombrowicz.  He co-founded and co-directed Swarthmore’s study-abroad programs in theater and dance in Poland (1999-2008). 

Kuharski is an internationally-published scholar and critic, best known for his work related to Polish theater and drama and contemporary director’s theater (Lupa, Grotowski, Kantor, Szajna, Chaikin, Mnouchkine, Ronconi, Warlikowski, Zadara).  He has given lectures in major universities across the US and in ten foreign countries.  His translations of stage works by Gombrowicz, Ionesco, and Różewicz have been widely performed in the United States and other countries. Kuharski is a co-editor of the 15-volume Witold Gombrowicz: Pisma Zebrane (Witold Gombrowicz: Collected Writings) published by Wydawnicto Literackie in Kraków.