Lisa Warrington

Warrington retired from the University of Otago on 30 June 2018, after 37 years of teaching, although she continues to work freelance and to maintain the Theatre Aotearoa database. Warrington began the database in 2004, and as of July 2021 it contained details on 17,156 New Zealand theatre productions in New Zealand and overseas. Her goal for the database is for it to cover all theatre productions in New Zealand from 1840 onwards.

Warrington was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Dunedin Theatre Awards in 2014. The same year she was awarded a New Zealand Theatre Services honour medal. Warrington has been created a Life Member of the Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies.

Warrington, a co-founder of Wow! Productions, directed more than 35 productions at Dunedin's Fortune Theatre, and was Acting Artistic Director of the Fortune for the latter part of 1985. She was then Associate Director of the Fortune from 1985 to 1991. She has directed more than 130 productions in total, including many for Wow! Productions.

Many of Warrington's academic publications deal with indigenous theatre in Aotearoa New Zealand, particularly Māori as well as Pasifika practitioners and productions. With David O'Donnell, Warrington wrote Floating Islanders: Pasifika Theatre in Aotearoa, a book based on interviews with practitioners over the course of seven years that, among other things, catalogues Pasifika theatre from 1984 to 2014. The book's title comes from an interview with Samoan playwright and filmmaker Makerita Urale.

Warrington taught at the University of Tasmania before being appointed as the William Evans Lecturer at the University of Otago in 1981. She initially had 30 students and was the University's only drama lecturer, with only three others in the entire country. In 1990, she led the introduction of a directing programme to the University of Otago's Theatre Studies programme. From 2011 she was appointed as Associate Professor there.

Warrington obtained a BA (Hons) from the University of Tasmania in 1973, with a thesis titled Dunbar, the concise artist: a study of aspects of language, structure and imagery in his poetry. In 1981 she followed this with an MA, also at the University of Tasmania, titled Allan Wilkie in Australia: the work of a Shakespearean actor-manager.

Lisa Jadwiga Valentina Warrington (born 1952) is a New Zealand theatre studies academic, director, actor and author. She has directed more than 130 productions, and established the Theatre Aotearoa database. In 2014 she was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Dunedin Theatre Awards, and was three times winner of a New Zealand Listener Best Director award, including one for Tom Scott's The Daylight Atheist.

Warrington was born in 1952, and spent much of her early life in England, Nigeria, and Australia. She is of English and Polish descent, her parents Jozef and Patricia (née McLean) having changed their surname to Warrington from Wawrzynczak. Her sister is Australian actress, songwriter and author Carmen Warrington (b. 1957); her brother Jan was a Multicultural Arts Officer and lighting designer based in Canberra (d. 2008).