Jim Wood currently serves on the KCACTF National Executive Committee as Member-at-Large. He also serves Region 5 as the Registrar and is the Immediate Past Chair. Jim is a Professor and the Artistic Director of Theatre & Dance at South Dakota State University. An actor, director, designer, manager and playwright, he prides himself on being a theatre generalist. Throughout his career, Jim has directed over 90 productions, acted in almost 45, designed over 50 and done the fight choreography for 15. In 2022 he started the annual Festival of New Plays at SDSU, complete with a 24 Hour Play Festival, which also invites playwrights to campus to workshop plays in development. Specific areas of interest include stage combat, dialects and management. During the summers he acts and directs with Prairie Repertory Theatre. Favorite shows he has done for PRT include the direction of The Play That Goes Wrong, appearing as Mitch in Tuesdays With Morrie and as Rev. Shaw Moore in Footloose. Prior to coming to SDSU, Jim ran the Olde Towne Dinner Theatre, South Dakota’s only year-round dinner theatre, for 9 years. Jim is the proud recipient of the F.O. Butler Award for Service and the Kennedy Center Gold Medallion. In the fall of 2022, he was honored by the SDSU College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences as the J.P. Hendrickson Liberal Arts Faculty Scholar and presented the Herbert Cheever Jr. Liberal Arts Lecture Connections: Using Theatre to Listen, Learn and Evolve.