Dr Kim Durban is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts. She has built a strong reputation as a theatre director of both new work and classic texts. She has also directed workshop productions of new Australian musicals A Little Touch of Chaos, The Hatpin and The White Rose, and a reading of Margaret of Anjou, the ‘new’ Shakespeare play, for Shakespeare 400.

She completed her PhD on the Caroline playwright Richard Brome. Read her commissioned essay, Upside Down at the Bottom of the World: Taking Richard Brome’s Plays to the Antipodes, and her journal article, “ ‘ I Love the Quality of Playing, I’ : Directing Adventures in Ballarat” appears in Australasian Drama Studies 57.

In 2012 she won the $12,000 EJ Barker Fellowship which facilitated research at the Royal Shakespeare Company archives held at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford upon Avon, and the archives of Shakespeare's Globe, London. Her original work Alice Arden was a Master of Dramatic Art – Direction (by Research) production, which radically reinterpreted female representation in Arden of Faversham. Kim received first class honours, and, because of this work, in late 2000 she was invited to address a Directors' Forum in New York at the Public Theatre, on the topic "Expanding the Presence of Women Directors". Kim was joint winner of the 1990 Ewa Czajor Memorial Award and has a current entry in the Who’s Who of Australian Women.

She is a peer assessor for Creative Victoria and a founding member of the Australian Women Directors Alliance. Her areas of expertise include Caroline playwright Richard Brome; Women Directors, including investigation into the career and legacy of Australian director Ewa Czajor; Shakespeare and Renaissance playwrights and actor training.

Research interests

• Women directors, including investigation into the career and legacy of Australian director Ewa Czajor
• Caroline playwright Richard Brome
• Shakespeare and Renaissance playwrights
• Australian playwrights
• Actor training