Jim Clayburgh
American theatre director

Jim Clayburgh (born May 23, 1949) is an American scenic designer. He was a founding member of The Wooster Group and served as the group's resident designer from 1975 to 1994. He currently lives in Brussels, Belgium, where he founded the company JOJI INC with choreographer and dancer Johanne Saunier, and continues to design for theatre, film, dance and opera both in the USA and in Europe.
Life and career
Jim Clayburgh is the brother of actress Jill Clayburgh (1944–2010).
Clayburgh holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Claremont McKenna College, majoring in design at Pomona College, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Theatre Design from New York University School Of The Arts. In the USA he has taught masterclasses at MIT, New York Tisch School of the Arts, University of California Santa Cruz, University of Michigan, Hollins University, Simons Rock College of Art. In Europe, he has taught at St Luc's Ecole Supérieur des Arts and the International School of Brussels.
He was part of the design team for the interior renovations of two major concert halls in Brussels: La Maison de la Radio at Flagey, Ixelles, and Le Palais des Beaux Arts.
In 2011 he gave a keynote address at the 41st International Theatre Festival at the Venice Biennale.
In 2013–14 he was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy of Rome.
The public source identifies “Jim Clayburgh” as american theatre director. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Clayburgh, American and theatre.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3178759. VIAF identifies the subject as 50985212. The Library of Congress control number is n97850536. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1949, 1975, 1994 and 1944.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jim Clayburgh” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.