Matt is an actor, theatre director, and educator.

Matt is a theatremaker at heart and has a fierce passion for playful collaborations and lyrical language. Any chance to turn a book into a play, he’s there. While in Chicago, Matt has had the good fortune to work with many incredible artists and companies and be a co-founder of The Story Theatre.

Before relocating to Chicago, Matt was the Education Director and is currently an Artistic Associate for The Rogue Theatre, where he has performed or directed over 30 productions. Favorites include Hamlet (Arizona Daily Star MAC award best actor), Waiting for Godot, The Crucible, Uncle Vanya, and many others, as well as being a part of original adaptations of literary classics such as As I Lay Dying, Mrs. Dalloway, and Tales of the Jazz Age. Matt is a founding member of Small Giants. The Small Giants Band grew from the creative partnership with composer Jake Sorgen, debuting as a duo at the Maverick Concert Hall in the summer of 2018. Small Giants blends music, poetry, and improvisation to tell stories as relatable as they are disjointed

As an educator, Matt served as a faculty member at Pima College and as a Faculty Fellow and teaching artist at the University of Arizona. Matt teaches acting fundamentals, voice and movement, ensemble training and devising, and directing for the stage.

Matt holds an M.F.A in Performance from the University of Georgia and is represented by DDO Chicago.

“Matt Bowdren’s Hamlet was haunting and haunted. He seems mad one moment, simply cunning the next. He is consumed with revenge but has tender moments. His sorrow and his passion are palpable...you get the sense that while Hamlet hears his father’s ghost when no one else can, speaks in riddles that seem to underscore his madness, and is wildly mercurial, he is crazy like a fox. Bowdren kept us glued to his actions and words, anxious to see where he would go to—and he would always go someplace interesting.”

— Arizona Daily Star

“Here is what we loved. Matt Bowdren brought all of Iago’s awful qualities to devastating life. He made him charming, destructive, jealous, cruel. He was hard to turn away from.”

— Arizona Daily Star

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Acting

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Directing

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“The key, of course, for making a production of this play work is an excellent Hamlet, and Rogue has given us one. Matt Bowdren captures Hamlet’s complicated personality, his intelligence and his wit with credibility and vulnerability, giving us an artfully compelling and complex character.”

— Tucson Weekly