Two careers in storytelling, told in parallel.

On the page and on the stage — for more than twenty-five years, Sue has been working on the same craft from two different angles.

Suzanne Gilad — Sue to nearly everyone who has worked with her — is a Grammy winner and a five-time Tony Award–winning Broadway producer. The headline numbers are the kind that catch a journalist mid-sentence: thirty Tony wins across her productions, eighty-four nominations, seventeen Broadway shows, and more than 1,200 books edited for the most respected names in publishing. The story behind those numbers is more interesting than any one of them, because it is really the story of two careers built on the same instinct.

Sue graduated from Brandeis University in 1993 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. She did what readers of English often do next: she picked up freelance work as a proofreader. What began as a way to pay rent quietly turned into a calling card. House editors started asking for her by name. The work moved up the chain — from proofreading galleys to copyediting on tight deadlines, from single-title assignments to standing relationships with Random House, Simon & Schuster, John Wiley & Sons, St. Martin’s Press, Oxford University Press, Workman Publishing, and Kensington. Over the years, the count of books she has proofread or copyedited has crossed twelve hundred. Each one is a small act of stewardship for another writer’s voice.

The longer she worked at the editing desk, the more clearly she saw how stories actually function — where a scene loses its rhythm, why a chapter end pulls a reader forward, when a writer should be trusted and when a writer needs a question. Those instincts became the foundation for her own books. The Real Estate Millionaire arrived first. Paid to Proofread turned her own career into a generous, practical handbook for other freelancers. And in 2007, John Wiley & Sons published Copyediting and Proofreading For Dummies — a reference still cited two decades later by people who learned the craft from it.

All the while, theatre was the other room in her life. Sue grew up inside the New York arts ecosystem, attended every show she could afford, and eventually crossed the line from devoted audience member to working producer. Producing, as she has said in interviews, is in many ways the work of an editor at the largest possible scale: identifying material that deserves a room of its own, attaching the right artistic team, defending the writer’s voice through every revision, and making a thousand small calls about money, time, and trust along the way.

With her producing partner Larry Rogowsky, Sue co-founded In Fine Company, the production company through which most of her Broadway work now flows. The partnership has shepherded a generation of landmark productions: Jagged Little Pill, which won the 2020 Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album; Moulin Rouge! The Musical, winner of ten Tony Awards including Best Musical; Company and Angels in America; the celebrated Sondheim revival of Merrily We Roll Along, which won the 2024 Tony for Best Revival of a Musical; The Outsiders, the 2024 Tony winner for Best Musical; and Buena Vista Social Club, a 2025 Tony nominee that brought the legendary Cuban collective to a Broadway stage. By the end of the 2024–25 season, Sue had been on the producing team of seventeen Broadway productions accounting for thirty Tony wins and eighty-four nominations.

More recently, Sue has been translating what she knows about the craft of producing into rooms that aren’t theatres. As a former Leadership Council Co-Chair for Broadway Cares / Equity Fights AIDS, she has been close to the industry’s most pressing philanthropic work for years. She created YPO Broadway: Behind the Curtain, an immersive executive leadership experience that puts Young Presidents’ Organization members backstage at Tony-winning shows and into structured workshops on creativity, agility, and human connection. She speaks and trains at corporate offsites on what a Broadway rehearsal room can teach a leadership team about feedback, iteration, and trust.

And then there is the philanthropy she has built under her own name. The Suzanne Gilad Grant is a $1,000 merit-based scholarship open to students of all majors. The Sue Gilad & Larry Rogowsky Theatre Scholarship removes two of the most common barriers students face — no essay required, no minimum GPA — so that promising theatre students can apply without first proving themselves on paper.

The page and the stage have always been the same work for Sue, seen from two sides. A book is a quiet, durable performance for one reader at a time. A musical is a loud, breathing book read out loud to a thousand strangers. The job, in both cases, is the same: pay close attention to the story, defend it against everything that would make it smaller, and send it out into the world in the best shape it can possibly be in.

Career Timeline

A working chronology.

If you take care of the story, the story will take care of the audience. That is true on the page, and it is true on the stage.

Suzanne Gilad