In December 2020, Thom Hofrichter finished a 24 year tenure as the Managing Artistic Director at First Presbyterian Theater in Fort Wayne, IN. During those years he has also served as an adjunct professor, teaching Communications at Purdue Fort Wayne and Manchester College; as well as theater at PFW and Huntington University.
Recently, Thom has worked professionally as an actor and director for the outdoor summer festival Shakespeare at the Castle in Alliance, OH. He also has professional credits which span the past 40 years from Pensacola, Las Vegas, Washington D.C., Chicago, Milwaukee, and Boulder, Colorado.
Thom was born and raised in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Upon graduation from Concordia Lutheran High School, he earned a BS in Accounting from Indiana University, Bloomington. In the fifteen years following his graduation from I.U. he supported himself as an actor, director, stage manager, lighting designer, producer, and educator in the theater; while earning a B.A. in Theater from UNLV, an M.A. in Communication from Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI, and pursing doctoral studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder where he will forever remain ½ a dissertation short of a Ph.D.
In the early 1990s Thom held the position of Managing Artistic Director for Studio 13 in Milwaukee and then later held the same title at D.A.M. Art Theater in Boulder. He returned to Fort Wayne to become FPT’s Managing Artistic Director in January of 1997. At FPT, Thom directed well over 100 plays, acted in dozens more, as well as written several Christmas Revues. He also adapted and staged works from Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters, Mark Twain’s The Diaries of Adam and Eve, and Ibsen’s, Brand.
Thom lives on the south-side of Fort Wayne with his wife Nancy, where they are loyal subjects to Queen Elizabeth I, a black Labrador retriever whom Thom and his wife serve.