Joseph Meissner
Actor/ Writer/ Producer
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A native Texan, Joseph Meissner has been acting since childhood. He graduated with honors from Brown University with a degree in Theater. His honors thesis was on German playwright/cabaret performer and Brecht’s mentor, Frank Wedekind.

Through his studies of European modernism (under Spencer Golub) and Asian performative traditions (with John Emigh), Joseph became interested in approaches to performance that were based on physical, rather than psychological techniques. Together with actors Cynthia J. Hopkins (Gloria Deluxe) and Doug Greco, a working group was established to explore the acting exercises of experimental theater director Jerzy Grotowski. Out of this collaboration arose several theatrical and musical performances including The 21st of May, performed in a jewelry warehouse in Providence and a barn in rural New Hampshire, and The Frankenstein Project, a guerrilla theater piece in the streets, basements and cemeteries of Providence which culminated in the John Waters-inspired short film The Candy Movie.

When his college friends Jason Neulander and David Bucci founded the now nationally-recognized Salvage Vanguard Theater in Austin, TX in 1994, they brought Joseph in to play the lead role of Scrub in their first production, Bucci’s Kid Carnivore. Joseph would continue to work closely with Salvage Vanguard over the ensuing years, particularly in productions of playwright/librettist/composer Ruth Margraff’s cutting-edge theater and operetta pieces.

In 1995, Joseph joined a small group of actors in a project led by Andre Gregory (My Dinner with Andre) to explore Grotowskian performance training and Chekhov monologues. With Andre’s recommendation, Joseph was able to travel to Pontedera, Italy in the Fall of that year to train at Grotowsky’s secluded and highly selective performance studio.

Returning to the U.S. in 1996, Joseph worked with Salvage Vanguard on Ruth Margraff’s rock operetta Wallpaper Psalm and with New York-based Mabou Mines Theater on The Red Horse Animation, directed by prominent writer/director Lee Breuer. The Red Horse toured to an international experimental theater festival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As part of that rehearsal process, Joseph received intensive training in contact improv dance and Ashtanga yoga, which added extra dimensions to the development of his physically-based approach to acting.

Joseph threw himself into the study of Shaolin kung fu in August 1996. While he continued to work on theater and film projects, over the next ten years he devoted himself primarily to martial arts training (including the Chinese internal arts of tai chi, pa kua, and hsing-ie).

It was during this period that the vision for The Hatchery began to form. First introduced through The Hatchery ‘zine and manifesto at the April 1998 Salvage Vanguard performance “Manifesto Destiny,” the original vision of The Hatchery was as a cross-disciplinary live/work/performance/community space modeled after AS220 in Providence, RI.

Salvage Vanguard began garnering positive critical attention locally and nationally with more ground-breaking productions of Margraff’s work such as 1998’s The Centaur Battle of San Jacinto, in which Joseph played Sam Houston, and 2001’s The Cry Pitch Carrolls, of which theater critic Robert Faires of the Austin Chronicle wrote, “The performers bring great heart to the tale: There [are] raw wails of pain in Joseph Meissner's fully grown Small Christus. The [actresses] reveal moving depths . . . and Meissner provides the ideal counterpoint to each.” Michael Barnes of the Austin-American Statesman called Joseph’s performance “uncanny.” He wrote, “only once in a very long while have we seen anything this mesmerizingly original.”

Joseph's credits as a stage director in include the world premeires of Heidi Carla's All in a Day's Idyll at the 1992 Brown New Plays Festival, and Adam Sobsey's The Essence of Comedy for Salvage Vanguard in 2000.

In 2001, Joseph moved to New Orleans, entered the MFA writing program at UNO and founded Shaolin-Do Kung Fu & Tai Chi, where he teaches martial arts and conducts private fitness and self-defense training. He has acted in many film projects and in 2003 collaborated with Kathy Randels and Jay Hammons of Moving Humans/ArtSpot on the performance pieces Venus, Vulcan, Mars and The Dancing Dwarf. He is the receipient of 2009 grants from the Louisiana Cultural Economy Foundation and Poets and Writers magazine.

Joseph directed and starred in the feature film Flood Streets, written and produced by his wife and creative partner with his wife, The Hatchery’s co-founder Helen Krieger. Flood Streets premiered at the 2011 WorldFest - The Houston International Film Festival, where it won the Gold Remi Award for Best Low-Budget Feature. Flood Streets was also an official selection of the 2011 Boston International Film Festival and the San Antonio Film Festival.