STEFAN HAVES: Clown Town Confidant

An award-winning global director of cirque, cinema and stage. As a comic act designer he specializes in clowns, characters and story components. Stefan is the author of The Power of HA!Connecting Through the Heart of Humor. He studied theatre in college only to realize that his true passion lay in the cross-over to the circus arts, so he set his sights on Cirque du Soleil. As a result of his intuitive gift for mining actors’ true potential, various sit-coms hired him to coach actors, including The Roseanne Show. After self-producing a number of critically acclaimed plays in Hollywood and New York City (Call of the Wild, Midsummer Nite’s Text, Your Town Follies, Moon Over Madness, Atomic Holiday Lift-Off) he traveled to Europe to juggle on the streets and study with the premiere master-teacher, Philippe Gaulier. This move resulted in a collaboration with Bill Irwin and David Shiner on the Tony- winning show Fool Moon. Haves was then poached by Cirque du Soleil, collaborating on clown and character performances within six touring and resident productions (Kooza, Iris, Amaluna, Banana Shpeel, Zaya, and Drawn to Life). Prior to that, he wrote and directed the world-class Teatro Zinzanni—a dinner/ cabaret featuring such luminaries as Joan Baez. Today, Stefan Haves is a trusted international thought-leader who was tapped to present a TedX Talk in New Delhi, India, and was invited to conduct personal appearances for blue-chip companies like PepsiCo, Infosys, Mindtree, and Barclays Bank. He gleefully shares his innovative message on the role of humor, creativity, and effective expression gleaned from the stage and applied to the corporate workplace. In 2021 Haves was granted the opportunity to co-direct Katy Perry’s Playland-branded New Year’s dinner/cirque event at Hilton’s Resort World in Las Vegas. Earlier in his career, Haves cut his teeth as an actor and a visual-comedian who appeared on stages and television shows worldwide—even garnering $10,000 on America’s Funniest People by performing his signature piece "Back-Man". Stefan’s 2016 original conception of the spectacle Festigal, in which Haves was tasked to showcase famous pop celebrities from television’s Romania’s Got Talent, used a Cirque du Soleil aesthetic in a stadium setting. His cinematic offerings include the award-winning short film Punch Drunk, featuring Academy Award nominee Sally Kellerman (M*A*S*H) and full-length feature Stalled starring Doug Jones (Pan’s Labyrinth).