Sebastian Doggart

Education

Doggart was educated at Montessori-style primary schools; Haverford School; Horris Hill School; Eton College, where he won an Oppidan Scholarship and the Queen's Prize for French; and King's College, Cambridge, where he obtained the top First class degree in Social and Political Sciences, and an MA, and was elected a Scholar. In 1984 he became the last student in Eton's history to receive corporal punishment.

Early writing career

Doggart began his career as a journalist in Latin America, working as a reporter on the Lima Times during two years he took off before going to Cambridge. Within three months on the job, he was promoted to co-Editor of the newspaper. At 19, he was the youngest editor the paper had had. In 1990, he moved to Argentina, where he became Finance and Economics Editor for the Buenos Aires Herald, chronicling an extraordinary period of hyperinflation, wholescale privatizations, and deregulation under President Carlos Menem's neo-liberal government.

Doggart parleyed his journalism work into a book, Investment Opportunities in Argentina, which had a foreword by Menem himself. Published in 1990, a month after he went to Cambridge, Doggart's own tutor, David Lehmann, reviewed the book in Professional Investor: "As the first optimistic economic report on Argentina to have been produced for some 20 years, this study acts as a clear indicator of the international business community's growing interest in the region."

Theatre career

After leaving Cambridge, Doggart trained as a drama director at Central School of Speech and Drama. His production of Ms Lear—which radically re-interpreted King Lear as a neo-Thatcherite woman—performed at theatres in London and Amsterdam. On graduating, he directed productions for eminent British companies Cheek by Jowl (world tour of The Duchess of Malfi); Actors Touring Company (Ion by Euripides); Theatre Museum Covent Garden (Playing with Fire by August Strindberg) and Creation Theatre Company (Romeo and Juliet, which Doggart set in 18th century Ireland, with English Capulets and Irish Montagues).

Doggart established himself as the leading translator/director of Latin American plays on the British stage. His production of Mistress of Desires, on which he collaborated directly with Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, premiered in 1993. He worked directly with Carlos Fuentes on the British premiere of Orchids in the Moonlight, a dream play about the love between two Mexican actresses exiled in Hollywood's maze of mirrors. Doggart rehearsed the play in Cuba and opened in the Teatro Nacional, Havana. The production went on to perform at the Edinburgh Festival. According to Scotland on Sunday, the production was "rich in language and movement, fantasy and reality, sensuality and cruelty; as iconoclastic as the magic realist boom of the 1960s." In 1994, Doggart translated and directed Night of the Assassins, by the Cuban author Jose Triana, staging it at the Technis theatre in London and at the Edinburgh Festival. According to The Scotsman: "Brilliant, at times almost unbearable to watch, the British premiere of this award-winning Cuban play is utterly compelling... The atmosphere of oppression is almost tangible as the audience feel themselves entangled in the hysteria and power games of three siblings enacting or re-enacting the murder of their parents." In 1996, Doggart translated and directed a double bill of plays at The Gate theatre: Saying Yes, by Griselda Gambaro and Rappaccini's Daughter, by Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz, with whom he collaborated on the translation. Sarah Alexander played the leading role of Beatrice. That same translation has been staged internationally, including a production by the Santa Fe Playhouse in July 2006. Doggart has since translated the only plays of two other leading Latin American writers: Diatribe of Love against a sitting man, by Gabriel García Márquez, and The Kings by Julio Cortázar.

In 1998, Doggart produced Northern Stage's 'Lorca Fiesta', a major festival in Newcastle upon Tyne to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. The event included an academic conference of international scholars and translators of Lorca and a dramatization of Lorca's Poet in New York, which Doggart adapted and directed. He was also producer and dramaturg for The Moon Comes Out, Federico, a collaboration between Northern Stage and the Seville-based company Octubre Danza, which fused story-telling, contemporary dance and live cante jondo to enact Lorca's long poem "Lament to Ignacio Sanchez Mejias".

In 2000, Doggart co-founded the Gaia arts center in Havana, Cuba, dedicated to providing theater practitioners with a safe and inspiring place in which to create. In 2007, Doggart devised and directed the live performance piece, Balance of Ice, which combined three elements: a piece of music by Canadian composer Andrew Staniland that was inspired by the sounds of ice sheets calving; a dance performance by acclaimed Cuban ballerina Viengsay Valdes that fragmented her usual balletic virtuosity; and edited moving images of the polar ice caps and the threats facing them.

Between 2007-08, Doggart translated and directed Cocinando con Elvis, a Spanish version of Lee Hall's play Cooking with Elvis, about food, sex, happiness, and Elvis Presley. The production opened at the Teatro Nacional in Havana, and was the first premiere of a British play in Cuba since An Inspector Calls opened in 1947.

Television career

In 1999, Doggart branched into television production, where he produced and/or directed for the BBC (Tomorrow's World'); Channel Four (Living on the Line), and worked as an associate producer on ITV series (The South Bank Show and Two Thousand Years). The Financial Times wrote of Two Thousand Years: "Well made and highly informative, the first series truly to deserve the 'Millennium label'." His interview profiles included Germaine Greer, Kenneth Branagh and Nobel prize-winning Octavio Paz.

In 2000, Doggart moved to the United States where he produced/directed major TV series including:

Film career

After writing and directing two short fictional films, Hole in the Wall and Three and a Bed, Doggart set up Tribute Films, a company that produced films for individuals, their loved ones and their pets. His production of Carol Connors and Her Cats, launched a longstanding collaboration with Connors, a passionate ailurophile (cat lover), Elvis Presley's former girlfriend, and a twice-Oscar-nominated songwriter. The film was lauded by Charlene Tilton as "the funniest thing I have ever seen". The Los Angeles Times described it as the first pet hagiography film ever made, and as "the Cadillac of filmed pet memorials".

In 2004, Doggart moved to New York City. From 2006, he spent three years making Courting Condi, the first musical docu-tragi-comedy in the history of cinema. The film won 26 awards on the festival circuit, screened at the Cannes Film Festival, and was critically acclaimed. By combining screenings of the film with public debates about its subject, Condoleezza Rice's record in office, Doggart fueled calls for Rice to be investigated for human rights abuses and war crimes.

In 2009, Doggart directed and produced another film about Rice, American Faust: From Condi to Neo-Condi. This investigative documentary explored in greater depth Rice's pursuit and alleged misuse of power, and revealed the direct role she had in fabricating reasons for going to war in Iraq, and in ordering torture, especially in CIA black sites around the world. The film won numerous awards on the festival circuit, and was broadcast on a raft of international stations, including Al-Jazeera.

In 2012, he completed a third feature film, True Bromance, an irreverent romantic comedy starring Jim Norton, Adrian Grenier, Frank Luntz, Devin Ratray and himself about the absurd role friends and family play when people fall in love. The film won 19 awards on the festival circuit, including Best Film at the Harlem International Film Festival, and Best Actor and Best Screenplay at the Washington DC International Film Festival. 'The Brooklyn Paper' described it as "a bromance for the ages." ‘The Brooklyn Eagle’ wrote: "Starring possibly the most surreal comedy troupe ever... True Bromance is consistently unnerving, funny and surprising and features an original comic-book style".

Doggart has written two other screenplays, Casanova's Return and Clinton a Neuro-Musical.

He is a voting member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

Political and human rights career

In 1993, Doggart led an Amnesty International campaign called Why the Silence? to investigate human rights abuses in Equatorial Guinea.

In 1997, Doggart was a campaign manager on Martin Bell's successful bid to become the first Independent MP to be elected to the British Parliament since 1945.

In 2000, Doggart co-founded the Felices Los Normales program at the Gaia arts center in Havana, Cuba, raising awareness about HIV/AIDS through improvised theater.

From 2009-10, Doggart used the release of his documentary American Faust: From Condi to Neo-Condi to launch a campaign to bring to justice officials in the Bush Administration whom contributors in the film —- including attorneys from the American Civil Rights Union, Amnesty International and Reprieve—allege are guilty of war crimes and torture. Amnesty International screened the film at Stanford University on the eve of Rice's return to the Hoover Institution, adding to pressure on Stanford authorities to expel her for allegedly dishonoring the college's Fundamental Standard to show "respect for order, morality, personal honor and the rights of others as is demanded of good citizens." Doggart teamed up with students at the University of Denver, where Rice was an undergraduate, by organizing a debate on the motion 'This house believes that Condoleezza Rice should stand trial for war crimes.' Proposing the motion was Rice's political theory professor, Alan Gilbert; defending Rice was Republican State Senator Sean Mitchell. The event met fierce resistance from the University administration. Vice Chancellor Jim Berscheidt had already tried to shut down a shoot and denied the producers access to archive of Josef Korbel. Up until the last moment, Berscheidt sought to use bureaucratic obstacles and alleged intimidation of students to stop the event. However, the screening and debate did eventually take place, with a strong turn-out, and webcast on both Mogulus television and through the Amnesty International website.

At a screening at the Starz Denver film festival in December 2009, and again in an interview with Progressive Voice, Doggart called for the prosecution of ten Bush Administration officials: President George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice (as NSA and chair of the Group of Principals who authorized the torture techniques), Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice-President Dick Cheney, CIA bosses George Tenet and Porter Goss, General Geoffrey D. Miller (commander at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo), Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Attorney Generals John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales. In February 2010, Doggart presented a screening of the film at New York's Revolution Books with human rights organizations World Can't Wait and War Criminals Watch. Screenings in Minnesota were also organized by Coleen Rowley, a former FBI agent turned whistle-blower, who called the film "a must-see documentary". The campaign continued through social networking sites and interviews in the press, radio and on PBS but has so far failed to secure its objective of Rice's arrest, prosecution and imprisonment. Efforts to this end were escalated in May 2010, following the announcement that Rice was to play a concert with Aretha Franklin. Doggart responded to this by corralling a group of human rights activists, including Rowley, War Criminals Watch, and Down With Tyranny, to pressure Franklin and the Philadelphia Orchestra to dump her from the concert billing, and to encourage either a citizen's arrest, or one instigated by Attorney General Eric Holder. These protests continued at a Denver University awards dinner, where Madeleine Albright presented the 2010 Josef Korbel Outstanding Alumni Award to Rice, while activists warned guests outside that "there's a war criminal in the area".

In 2014 and 2015, Doggart was the chief judge on the annual Tackling Torture Video contest.

In 2016, Doggart was appointed President of the New York Families Civil Liberties Union.

Writing career

Doggart has had three books published: Fire Blood and the Alphabet: One Hundred Years of Lorca focused on Spanish playwright and poet, Federico García Lorca. The book included poems, translations and an essay by Doggart, as well as eminent Lorca scholars, and was published in a second edition in January 2010. Stage Labyrinths: Latin American Plays included Doggart's translations of five Latin American dramatic works, as well as interviews with the writers and a history of Latin American theater His third book is on the Argentine economy. He has been a principal contributor to five other books – Stages of Conflict: A critical anthology of Latin American theater and Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2008), Purple Homicide: Fear and Loathing on Knutsford Heath (Bloomsbury, 1998), Raymond Chandler: A Biography (Atlantic, 1997), Reflections in a Family Mirror (Red House, 2002), and Time Out: Havana (Penguin, 2001, 2005, 2007) – and has written for New Statesman, The Guardian, The Independent, The Observer, The Telegraph, The Huffington Post and The Sunday Telegraph.

In 2011, Doggart became a columnist for The Daily Telegraph, writing a twice-monthly column from New York on film, literary, political, family and comedic subjects. He also worked as a film reviewer for The Guardian.

Family

Doggart is the grandson of the eminent ophthalmologist and writer James Hamilton Doggart; son of the author/development economist Caroline Doggart and the international financier and philanthropist Anthony Doggart; brother of the conservationist Nike Doggart; nephew of the cricketer and educator, Hubert Doggart; and cousin of the headmaster, Simon Doggart.

Publications

Newspaper and journal articles

Reviews of work