Curator of Performing Arts and Music

Saidpour directs the Cleveland Museum of Art’s robust schedule of concerts and films—an eclectic roster that includes from classical to world music and from avant-garde to traditional. In this capacity he has presented some of the finest performing artists from 70 countries around the world to hundreds of thousands of audiences.

He studied the performing arts with Polish theatre master Jerzy Grotowski and his associates—master performing artist from diverse world cultures such as Bali, Korea, Haiti, the U.S. among others.

As a stage director, Saidpour has directed extensively both nationally and internationally. His critically acclaimed Persian Cycles, a series of performances based on Persian classical literature and performance idioms, was the subject of an in-depth study by the New Theatre Quarterly (Cambridge University Press), and was featured in The Drama Review (MIT Press). Other directorial highlights include Phantoms of King Lear (adapted from Shakespeare's King Lear), for which he received an Editor's Choice award from the American Theatre magazine; He and She (based on Anton Chekhov's one act plays and short stories); Come and See! (adapted from Goethe's Faust); The Chairs by Eugene Ionesco; Swan Song + Confessions (based on Anton Chekhov’s one act play Swan Song and Nikolai Gogol’s Diaries of a Madman); The Gamblers by Nikolai Gogol; and Endgame by Samuel Beckett.

He is a contributing author to Grotowski's Objective Drama Research (University Press of Mississippi).