tor, director, screenwriter, and producer of films and plays, Robbins has won numerous awards, including an Oscar for best supporting actor for Mystic River, and the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for Robert Altman's The Player--The Play ers._ Dead Man Walking_, for which he was director, screenwriter, and producer, has won numerous awards including an Oscar for best actress for Susan Sarandon. Robbins is also artistic director of Actors' Gang, the theater company he founded in 1982 that has staged more than 80 productions, earning hundreds of awards. His show Embedded ran for more than four months at New York's Public Theater, always selling out, and then embarked on a tour that touched London and much of the United States. With the Actors Gang, he staged a much-discussed and highly successful adaptation of George Orwell's 1984, which was presented on four different continents. Robbins and his company promote educational programs in Los Angeles-area schools, and for the past five years they have begun to offering theater workshops involving inmates of California city correctional institutions.

During its 35 years, The Actors' Gang has earned international recognition for staging more than 150 new and unconventional plays and dynamic re-interpretations of classics, staged to Los Angeles, in 39 of the United States and on 5 continents. Led by artistic director Tim Robbins, the company was founded in 1981 from a group of like-minded artists driven by a desire to produce plays that make sense for the society in which we live and restore the stage to its original function as a sacred place. Through an advanced educational program, the company's actors introduce theatrical techniques to students to risk encouraging them to discover their creativity. The dedicated prison project-recently recognized by the White House and the Department of Justice-currently involves eight correctional institutions in California, giving male and female prisoners the opportunity to have access to rehabilitation programs, which have significantly lowered recidivism rates. The Actors' Gang's first international tour was in 1989, when it presented at the Edinburgh Festival, Carnage, to Comedy, later presented at the Public Theater in New York. from Then the company toured Europe, Asia, Australia, and the entire American continent, with several productions, including A Midsummer Night's Dream, George Orwell's 1984, The Trial of the Catonsville 9, The Guys, The Exonerated, Moliere's Tartuffe, and Embedded, a satire against the Iraq War.