Michael Cotey is the Joaquin Oliver Artistic Producer of ENOUGH! Plays to End Gun Violence, a ground-breaking campaign of theater activism for teens to confront the issue gun violence by writing original short plays on the topic and staging readings of those plays in theatres across the country. Readings of ENOUGH! have taken place in over a hundred locations since 2020, including flagship productions at The Kennedy Center and Lincoln Center. The work of ENOUGH! has been featured on PBS NewsHour, NPR, and the BBC, and was awarded the Golding Foundation Exemplary Project Award.
In addition to generating new plays about gun violence written by teens, Michael and ENOUGH! has collaborated with gun violence prevention activist Manuel Oliver to develop his solo theater piece GUAC: The One Man Show, about his relationship with his son Joaquin, who was one of the victims of the Marjory Stoneman Douglass mass shooting.
Michael has directed at Illinois Shakespeare Festival, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, Next Act, Nebraska Repertory Theater, First Stage, Northwestern University, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Illinois Wesleyan University and Youngblood Theatre. He has also assisted at Goodman Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Utah Shakespeare, Steppenwolf, and Milwaukee Rep, for prominent directors, like Tony Award-winners Mary Zimmerman and Robert Falls.
In 2023 he served as the Festival Producer for World Premiere Wisconsin, an inagural and first-of-its-kind statewide new play festival. From 2009-2013 he was the Founding Artistic Director of Youngblood Theatre, regularly celebrated by the theater community and the press as one of the most exciting new Milwaukee theater ventures in decades.
Michael graduated from UW-Milwaukee with a BFA in Acting and from Northwestern University with an MFA in Directing. In 2014 he was named UWM’s “Graduate of the Last Decade.”
