Ildiko Nemeth is the Founder and Artistic Director of the New Stage Theatre Company (NSTC), and the director, producer, and creative force behind the company’s premieres.

From 1990 to 1998, she was a member of the R.S. 9 Theater Company in Budapest, touring internationally with numerous critically acclaimed productions. After moving to New York City in 1998, she graduated from The Actors Studio Drama School in 2002 and started NSTC the same year.

With her NSTC ensemble, Nemeth adapts and directs foreign writers’ works in New York and creates original pieces. Her productions have won notice and fascination for their bold, provocative effect, achieved by juxtaposing complex, difficult themes with physical and absurdist humor. NSTC has become known as a “daring experimental group” (Backstage) that uses a strong conceptual framework to achieve a “unique theatrical vision that creates wonder for mature sophisticated audiences” (New York Theatre Wire). Reviewing the company's 2018 production for The Theatre Times, critic Jessica Rizzo said of Nemeth: "Hopefully, she will be staging tough, taut productions like Rechnitz for many more years to come. New York needs more dauntless directors like her."

Melody of Things (working title), an original play is inspired by writings of Italo Calvino and created by Ildiko Nemeth and Marie Glancy O’Shea.

This fantastical, intrigue-driven story is based on the stories and unfulfilled ideas of the inimitable Italo Calvino.  His 1973 novella, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, centered on a group of travelers who lose their ability to speak after traversing a forest and use tarot cards to communicate. Calvino wrote a sequel, The Tavern of Crossed Destinies, and intended another, The Motel of Crossed Destinies—but it was never written.  This germ of an idea suggests fantastic theatrical possibilities. Melody of Things (working title) takes inspiration from the cryptic, treacherous meaning-making of the Crossed Destinies travelers and their ambiguous tarot symbols. But it features a very different milieu: a Route 66-style motel, where characters present tales harrowing and humorous through a very different set of symbolic images. Uncle Sam, the Roadrunner and Coyote, Blondie and Dagwood, and other archetypal figures speak to the universal dynamics shaping our lives. Through these images, and narration/interpretation by the motel receptionist, the travelers’ stories are intertwined into a beautiful and haunting drama, as these characters move fluidly between their surroundings and the realms of memory and imagination. The result is a hauntingly evocative drama imbued with a sense of magical possibility.

While the aesthetics and references of our composition are pure Americana, with the historical and current associations this implies, the stories’ core will embody elements of universal human experience in a way that resonates deeply with Calvino’s original concept. It speaks to a pervasive sense of lostness and disillusionment with resonance in every age, not least ours; at the same time, it offers hints at the possibility of answering crises of disconnection and discovering hope.

Ildiko Nemeth's 2015 and 2019 productions with NSTC won NY Innovative Theatre Awards for Outstanding Performance Art Production and her shows have been nominated for numerous IT Awards over the years, including Outstanding Director. In 2016 she took home the prestigious Caffe Cino Fellowship, awarded to a company consistently producing outstanding work. In 2017 Nemeth established The New Stage Performance Space, NSTC's permanent artistic home, where she continues to present boundary-defying works and to support the creation of original, multidisciplinary productions.