Alex Harvey (director)

Alex Harvey was born and raised in Denver, Colorado.^[1] He attended Graland Country Day School there as a child and East High School as a teenager.^[2] He ultimately graduated high school from Colorado Academy^[1] in 1999.^[3] Growing up, he acted in numerous high school^[1] and community theater productions.^[2] After high school, he attended Northwestern University, earning degrees in directing and ethnomusicology.^[1] He also directed stage productions while at Northwestern.^[4]

One of Harvey's first professional stage credits after graduating from Northwestern was as the director of General Desdemona, which was staged during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2004.^[5] Harvey later relocated to New York City. In 2007, he directed a production of I Am My Own Wife which was staged in both Des Moines, Iowa (at the Civic Center of Greater Des Moines)^[6] and Houston, Texas (at the Stages Repertory Theatre).^[7] This would lead to him directing several other plays in the Houston area in 2008, including Underneath the Lintel (Alley Theatre)^[8] and Mr. Marmalade (Stages).^[9]

In 2009, when Harvey was the artist-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley's Arts Research Center, he co-wrote an operatic adaptation of Michael Pollan's 2001 book, The Botany of Desire. He worked with both Pollan and fellow artist-in-residence John Gromada to devise the musical.^[10] A reading of the adaptation was performed at Berkeley in April 2009.^[11] In March 2010, Harvey directed the students of the American Conservatory Theater's MFA program in a production of O Lovely Glowworm, or Scenes of Great Beauty at San Francisco's Zeum Theater.^[12]

In January 2011,^[13] Harvey returned to the Stages Repertory Theater in Houston where he directed a production of Oh, the Humanity.^[14] Later that year, he co-directed (with Melissa Kievman and Brian Mertes) a production of Balm in Gilead, which was staged for one night in an empty warehouse in Industry City in Brooklyn's Sunset Park neighborhood.^[15]

In August 2013, Harvey directed Waiting for Waiting for Godot which was staged during the New York International Fringe Festival.^[16] It went on to be honored with the Overall Excellence Award by the festival^[17] and was given a brief extended run of three nights the following month.^[18] Throughout this time,^[1] Harvey taught at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts,^[2] directing and writing productions for graduate students including stagings of an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire^[19] and an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt called Peer@Me.^[20]

Beginning in 2012, Harvey started appearing in a variety of GEICO insurance ads for the nationwide "Happier than" campaign in which he played the mandolin.^[1] He would later appear as the featured mandolin and tenor guitar player on the Michael Cerveris & Loose Cattle album, North of Houston (2014),^[21] and other subsequent recordings.^[22]

In 2016, Harvey began filming for Walden: Life in the Woods supported in part by an incentive grant from the Colorado Economic Development Commission.^[23] Walden is loosely based on the Henry David Thoreau book of the same name. Harvey had been devising the film with a group of other Colorado natives as far back as 2009.^[2] Demián Bichir and T.J. Miller were added to the cast in August 2016.^[24] The film was shot and set entirely in Colorado and had its premiere at the Denver Film Festival in November 2017.^[2] It went on to appear at numerous film festivals in 2017 and 2018 including the Whistler Film Festival,^[25] RiverRun International Film Festival,^[26] and Oaxaca FilmFest.^[27] It received a wide release on various digital platforms in October 2019.^[28]

Harvey also co-directed^[29] (with director Brian Mertes) the film, I Am a Seagull,^[30] a hybrid narrative film and documentary^[31] that follows the Lake Lucille Chekhov Project as it stages its annual production of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull. It premiered in March 2018 in New York City.^[30] Harvey also directed a black-and-white silent film called, The Unsilent Picture, which stars Bill Irwin. It was screened throughout October 2018 in a tent theater at the Philipsburg Manor in Sleepy Hollow, New York, and each showing was accompanied by a live soundtrack.^[32]