Do you need a “certified” intimacy director? Or a qualified one?
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Do you need a “certified” intimacy director? Or a qualified one?

A header graphic featuring an image of a couple kissing in falling snow with text that reads "Do you need a 'certified' Intimacy Director? Or a qualified one?"

What is an Intimacy Director?

An Intimacy Director or ID (sometimes called an Intimacy Choreographer) is one type of Intimacy Professional whose job it is to 1) choreograph moments of intimacy for theatre, dance, opera, or other live performance and 2) to promote a culture of care and consent in the rehearsal room. Other types of jobs performed by Intimacy Professionals include “Intimacy Coordinator”—someone who works with onscreen media like film & tv; and “Intimacy Consultant”—someone who might help with season planning or pre-production by reading scripts and assessing possible needs for intimacy support or by leading one-off trainings to introduce a company to consent / boundary practices. While there has been intimate content in theatre for ages, the role of Intimacy Director—as a person not just qualified to stage an intimate scene, but who is expected to do so in an ethical and consent-based way—is relatively new, since approximately 2016.

But What is Theatrical Intimacy?

According to Pacific Northwest Theatrical Intimacy, Theatrical Intimacy is the presentation of material onstage that includes, but is not limited to “sexual actions, nudity, kissing, stripping, and sexual violence.” Theatrical Intimacy Education Co-Founders Chelsea Pace and Laura Rikard in collaboration with Ann James of Intimacy Coordinators of Color and Bliss Griffin of Actors Equity says that narrow definitions of intimacy can also be expanded beyond sex to include “leveraging an artist’s characteristics to stage heightened race, gender, pregnancy, disability, religion, national origin, or age-related content”. Due to this expansive definition, what counts as theatrical intimacy (and therefore might deserve additional care, support, or choreography) is largely up to the person or people involved. 

Qualified or Certified?

Qualification and certification are different ideas, which address a similar impulse: Before hiring someone, how do I make sure they can do the job? The field of intimacy is new enough and the practice of certification is complicated enough that at least as of this writing in 2023, there’s no industry-wide standard for certification, just training programs which claim to “certify” and training programs that don’t. And while certified intimacy professionals are often qualified, they’re not always qualified nor always the best person for the job. Additionally, the practice of certification itself can be unfairly exclusionary and uphold barriers for folks from marginalized identities to access the work. Therefore, often when someone says “I need a certified intimacy professional”, it’s helpful to think that what they might really mean is “I need a qualified intimacy professional”. Given these circumstances, it behooves producers and directors to establish more specific and flexible frameworks for determining an intimacy professionals’ qualifications and/or appropriateness for a given project. (SAG-AFTRA has developed a great list of 9 core Expertise / Training areas they recommend for Intimacy Coordinators, which can easily be applied to Intimacy Directors for live theatre as well. Take a look at my downloadable check-list or personal resume to see how.)

Why is “certification” problematic? While standards for qualification are gradually emerging (the field of intimacy direction as we know it is less than 20 years old), the standards for certification through different training organizations are wildly different. And the overall practice of certification can cause systemic harm by reinforcing economic disparities amongst different racial groups and excluding from consideration those with tremendously valuable lived or learned experience. High cost certification programs offered by individual training organizations often don’t allow practitioners to test out, transfer credit, or otherwise customize their investment of time and money to avoid costly redundancies of their training or experience from other sources. And since the field is new and the scope of an intimacy professionals’ work is broad (ranging from consent and boundary practices to choreography, mental health / trauma stewardship, modesty garments and more), past experiences or training really can make a difference. In fact, most of the people who started doing this work did so based on the training they had available at the time (which was not in theatrical intimacy as we know it today).

If an intimacy director’s primary responsibility is to choreograph moments of intimacy while promoting a culture of care and consent in the rehearsal room, there are a huge variety of professional and educational backgrounds which would qualify someone for that work. For example, dance choreographers, fight directors, mental health practitioners, sex educators, actors, stage managers, or dressers might all carry incredibly relevant skills and make fantastic IPs with just a bit of specialized training. 

What would you want as an actor?

Since an IDs job is largely to advocate for those with least power and actor’s are often the people in the rehearsal room with least power and greatest risk, another way to frame this question of qualification is to ask, what’s the minimum background / training requirements you would be comfortable with to work with an ID as an actor?

Here’s my personal answer. If I were an actor, I would want my Intimacy Director to have…

EITHER…

  • Training in at least half of SAG-AFTRA recommended expertise and training areas. (Not all areas are relevant to every production. For example, not every production involves nudity and therefore not every production requires expertise in modesty garments.)
  • Experience applying their training as a lead or assistant on at least one past production.
  • Positive Testimonials from actors who’ve worked with them in the past specifically mentioning safety, comfort, or boundaries.

OR

  • A clearly articulated approach to promoting consent and boundaries in the rehearsal room.
  • A strongly favorable recommendation from someone I trust.

All the rest is icing on the cake, or more accurately, the preferred qualifications for a particular project. Remember that intimacy can be so many different things. Intimacy can be sexual/romantic, but it can also be familial, collegial, situational. Medical situations, bodily functions, hyper-visibilized race and gender could all be considered intimacy. Not all projects involve nudity and therefore not all projects will require an ID experienced with modesty garments. Some Intimacy Professionals are capable of doubling as cultural consultants, fight directors, or mental health coordinators; others are not. Having people in any of those additional roles may or may not be necessary for a given production, but the intersection of an Intimacy Director’s role with these other areas of training/expertise is part of what makes it so important to consider candidates from diverse backgrounds.

Qualification is always related to the needs of your specific production. There is no one-size fits all standard for determining an intimacy directors’ qualification or appropriateness for every production since every production is different.

Jordan Rosin

Here’s the thing: Qualification is always related to the needs of your specific production. There is no one-size fits all standard for determining an intimacy directors’ qualification or appropriateness for every production since every production is different. Allowing these differences in needs to be met by aspiring and early-career Intimacy Directors from diverse training backgrounds is something producers can do to ensure we’re continuing to foster a more diverse pool of intimacy professionals in the future.

Still need more help determining an ID’s qualifications?

Download my handy check-list.

Looking for an Intimacy Director in the Pacific Northwest?

Check out Pacific Northwest Theatrical Intimacy Professionals database for over a dozen established and emerging Intimacy Directors working in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and British Columbia.

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