My Journey: Linette Linton
Lynette Linton found her voice at the National Youth Theatre by discovering what she was not. She was a member of the NYT while living at her family home in Leytonstone, east London, and trying to work out what she wanted to do. There she realised she wasn’t an actor. It was at the NYT that she met the performer and director Rikki Beadle-Blair, who told her she was a writer. That encouragement led her to write her play Step, staged at Theatre Royal Stratford East, and set her on the path to writing and directing. She later came back to the NYT as a professional director. In 2018 she directed Function, written by Sophie Ellerby, at the Criterion Theatre in the West End. That same year she was named the next artistic director of the Bush Theatre.
Lynette Linton was born in January 1990 and studied English at the University of Sussex. She learned to direct on the job, as resident assistant director at the Donmar Warehouse and associate director at the Gate Theatre, where she later directed Assata Taught Me.
Her production of Lynn Nottage’s Sweat at the Donmar won her the Black British Theatre Award for Best Director. It also won the Evening Standard Award for Best Play and was nominated for the Olivier for Best New Play. She co-directed Richard II at Shakespeare’s Globe with Adjoa Andoh, with a cast made up entirely of women of colour. Her National Theatre production of Blues for an Alabama Sky (2022) won Best Director at both the Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards.
When she took over the Bush from Madani Younis in 2019, she quoted James Baldwin’s line that “the place in which she would fit would not exist until she made it.” Under her programming the theatre won four consecutive Olivier Awards, for Baby Reindeer, Old Bridge, The P Word and Sleepova, and in 2024 transferred Red Pitch and Shifters to the West End.
Her other productions include Clyde’s at the Donmar and Alterations at the National Theatre (2025). She directed her final Bush production, Not Your Superwoman, in autumn 2025, and stepped down in 2026, succeeded by Taio Lawson. She is a BAFTA-nominated director for screen and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.