Rick Kemp has received numerous awards on both sides of the Atlantic for his work as an actor and director. He has performed with leading British companies Complicite, the Almeida, and The Oxford Playhouse, as well as touring his solo clown show Coming Home worldwide. He was the Artistic Director of London’s Commotion Theatre Company from 1991 to 1998, and collaborated with Nobel Prize-winning playwright Dario Fo on the English language premiere of Mistero Buffo, performing the show at London’s Riverside Studios and Tricycle Theatre and on tour, subsequently receiving the French Government's CROUS Award for Theatre. Work in the USA  includes directing Hamlet and Riddley Walker at The Pittsburgh Playhouse, directing Shrew! and The Comedy of Errors for Unseam'd Shakespeare, and acting in numerous shows for Quantum Theatre, including The Wild Duck, Richard III, I.D., The Crucible, Le Grand Meaulnes, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, The Museum of Desire, and Cymbeline. His work as a writer and director of new works with Squonk Opera has been supported by awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is also the recipient of the 2004 Heinz Endowments Creative Heights Award for his clown show e-lectricity