Paulus and her husband, Randy Weiner, along with a few other theater school graduates established a small theater troupe in New York City called Project 400 Theatre Group. With Project 400, Paulus and Weiner specialized in creating avant-garde musical productions which married classic theater and modern music. Paulus’ first production with the group was a rock version of The Tempest. Other productions included an R&B Phaedra and a hip-hop Lohengrin. In collaboration with Weiner, Paulus co-created The Donkey Show, a disco adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which ran off-Broadway from 1999 to 2005. Critics cited the production as an example of a trend in which edgy avant-garde theater had become fashionably mainstream.

In 2015, Paulus directed the new musical Waitress, based on the 2007 film of the same name, written by Adrienne Shelly. The music was written by six-time Grammy Award nominated singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles. The production was notable after it moved to Broadway and became the first Broadway musical with an all female creative team. The musical was nominated for four Tony Awards and the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. It is currently on Broadway at the Brooks Atkinson Theater and on US National Tour.

In 2012, Paulus directed a production of Pippin for the American Repertory Theater. She cast a woman, Patina Miller, in the part of Leading Player, originated by Ben Vereen. The production opened on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre on Broadway, on April 25, 2013. Paulus won the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical, becoming the third woman to win the award after Julie Taymor in 1998 and Susan Stroman in 2001.

In 2011 she staged a production of the Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess at the American Repertory Theater, which moved to Broadway in 2012. The production was nominated for 10 awards in the 2012 Tony Awards, winning Best Revival of a Musical and Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical for Audra McDonald. The production ran through September 23, 2012. It played 322 performances, 17 more than the 1953 revival, making it the longest-running production of Porgy and Bess on Broadway.

In 2010, Paulus directed Il mondo della luna (The World on the Moon), an opera by Joseph Haydn, in the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. A Gotham Chamber Opera, in partnership with the Museum and in association with American Repertory Theater, Paulus’ production fused live opera and stargazing using the 180-degree dome with projections courtesy of NASA.

Paulus was slated to direct Paul Simon’s The Capeman at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park for the Public Theater in August 2010.

In May 2008, Paulus was named the artistic director of the American Repertory Theater (affiliated with Harvard University). The American Repertory Theater chose Paulus after a 16-month search to replace Robert Brustein in an effort to revitalize the program. Paulus’ first production was a revival of The Donkey Show. Paulus previously taught courses at Columbia University and Yale University.

On October 1, 1995, she married fellow Harvard graduate Randy Weiner. They have two daughters.

She attended the Brearley School, studied dance at New York City Ballet, and trained in classical piano. In 1988, she graduated magna cum laude from Radcliffe College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Studies and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She then earned a master’s degree from the Columbia University School of the Arts.

Diane Marie Paulus (born 1966) is an American theatre and opera director who is currently the Terrie and Bradley Bloom Artistic Director of the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University. Paulus was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical for her revival of Hair, and won the award in 2013 for her revival of Pippin. She received the 2009 Harvard College Women’s Leadership Award and the Columbia University IAL Diamond Award, and was selected for the 2014 TIME 100, TIME Magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. .

Paulus was born in New York City in 1966, the daughter of a New York television producer and Japanese mother. Her parents met while her father was stationed in Japan after World War II.