Donald Fidler
Critique Groups Co-Chair
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Donald Fidler has combined a career in academic psychiatry and cultural psychiatry with a career of playwriting, acting, directing, composing music, and teaching acting and playwriting.

Dr. Fidler studied chemistry, theatre, writing, medicine, and psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he served on the faculty for eight years. He served on the faculty at West Virginia University for twenty-three years, teaching cultural psychiatry, clinical psychiatry, and acting. He lived and worked with the Alutiiq tribe in Akhiok, Alaska, the Al Moqbali Bedouin tribe near Sohar, Oman, the Kalkadoon Aboriginal Tribe in the outback of Queensland, Australia, and the Te Tau Ihu Maori Tribes on the South Island of New Zealand.

Donald Fidler began his acting career in North Carolina outdoor dramas, summer stock theatre, and local film and television at the age of ten. He studied acting, writing, music, and directing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He studied lighting, dance, and choreography at the Carolina Art School, and studied lighting for three years under Emmy-nominated lighting director Kenneth Craig. Dr. Fidler wrote scripts and composed music for over fifty medical educational videos at UNC-CH and WVU, composed three musicals, and wrote seventeen plays that were produced in various community theatres and universities in North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia, as well as St. Louis, Sacramento, San Diego, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, and New York. Dr. Fidler consulted and appeared in special educational productions for HBO, ABC, and PBS. He performed in numerous stage plays including: Hope is the Thing with Feathers, Night of January 16th, Thieves’ Carnival, Blood Wedding, Our Town, Shiraz, A Life in the Theatre, School Children Hiding Under Desks, Boogieban, and Fool for Love. Dr. Fidler is presently a scriptwriter, film director, and medical consultant for Symptom Media, a San Diego Company that under his direction produced over 400 health-professional educational films with professional actors demonstrating mental health issues. He served as resident playwright for M.T. Pockets Theatre and taught playwriting for ten years in Morgantown, W.V. He is an active member of the Dramatists Guild of America.