Lee’s article, It Sure Beats the Alternative!, appears in MaineHealth’s THRIVE, Survivorship Digital Magazine, Summer Edition, 2025. It describes the value of early detection, maintaining the best health possible throughout life, and having a positive mental attitude. As he successfully battled cancer during the past two years Lee maintained a regular work schedule as a Ski Instructor at Lost Valley Ski Area and as a Park Ranger at Reid State Park, but his most recent theater assignment was as the creator and Director of the Political Theater Program at Harpswell Coastal Academy in Brunswick, Maine, a school for Social Change, Entrepreneurship, and the Environment. Their mission and his is to create an engaged community of creative thinkers, compassionate leaders, and effective problem solvers.

Before moving to his current home in Brunswick, Maine, Lee served as Curriculum Specialist at the Axiom Educational and Training Center and the National Digital Equity Center in Machias, Maine, where he developed and taught classes in English and Math, Digital Literacy, Adult Education, Professional Development, Experiential Learning, and College and Career Readiness programs.

From 1998 through 2007 Lee was the Director of the theater program and Associate Professor of Theater and Speech at the University of Maine at Machias, and has since served on the faculties of The College of the Atlantic and The Maine School of Science and Mathematics directing productions of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People and David Auburn’s Proof.

For more than forty-five years, Lee has taught classes in all aspects of theater, literature, writing and interdisciplinary fine arts including acting, directing, theater history, design, stagecraft, public speaking, art and technology, critical studies, and the business of the arts. He’s particularly interested in promoting adolescent and digital literacy and in mounting contemporary plays that have social relevance to his community. His favorite playwrights are Tom Stoppard, Caryl Churchill, Christopher Durang, Tennessee Williams, and William Shakespeare.

He earned his MFA in Theater at the California Institute of the Arts, his BA in English Literature at Union College, and is certified to teach Secondary English Language Arts and Adult Education in the state of Maine. Lee has previously served on the faculties of Tulane and Fairleigh Dickinson Universities, at Union College, and has presented workshops and symposia on theater sound at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival and the New England Theater Conference. He’s directed productions Off and Off-Off Broadway in New York and for regional, college, university, and community theaters across the country.

A member of AEA and SAG, he’s acted in New York, on national tours, and in England, performing on stage, television, film, and in music videos. As a member of the Stage Managers Association and Actors’ Equity, he’s stage-managed Off and Off-Off-Broadway including productions of The Importance of Being Earnest starring Cherry Jones and The Taming of the Shrew directed by Julie Taymor. Representative projects include a contemporary, video-enhanced Twelfth Night, a staged pop-up book of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, performing in WNET/Thirteen (NY)’s Slavery and the Making of America, King Lear starring James Gammon, and as Hook in Peter Pan. An accomplished musician, Lee sings and plays guitar. As a member of the Dramatists Guild, Lee’s original comedy Agency was performed at Opera House Arts in Stonington, Maine. His most recent theater project had Lee playing a hand in the development of Roger Holzberg’s The Trial of Mother Jones at The Elite Theatre in Ventura, California.

Outside of the theater, Lee is an avid outdoorsman. He welcomes winter as a certified PSIA Alpine Skiing Instructor and the rest of the year has a particular love for trail riding, hiking, kayaking, the beach, and softball. He’s proud of the accomplishments of his two sons Ben and Corin, recent graduates of Middlebury and Vassar Colleges, and he has a special interest in things scientific, especially astronomy, biology, physics, and computers.

“To laugh often and much; to win the respect of the intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the beauty in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that one life has breathed easier because you lived here. This is to have succeeded.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson