Sean Hill

Nationalities

Chicago New York City San Francisco Austin United States

Sean Hill is the founder of Austin Theatresports (1998) and The Hideout Theatre (1999), Austin's longest-running improv theater. Trained in the Keith Johnstone tradition at BATS Improv in San Francisco, Hill brought Theatresports to Austin, established a permanent performance home for the city's improv community at 617 Congress Avenue, and co-founded the We Could Be Heroes School of Improvisational Theatre before transitioning to a parallel career as a UX designer, applied improv facilitator, and writer.

Hill's trajectory toward improv began after a first career developing video games from age 19 through his company Top Dog Software, which produced award-winning titles during the 1990s. His encounter with improv in San Francisco, where he trained at BATS Improv (Bay Area Theatresports), introduced him to Keith Johnstone's Theatresports format and the West Coast long-form tradition that BATS had developed since 1986.

Inspired by what he had encountered in San Francisco, Hill returned to Austin and in November 1998 held auditions with David Lampe for a new troupe called Austin Theatresports. In the early rehearsal period, Hill drew directly on his BATS training and flew in California veterans Dan O'Connor and Brian Lohmann to lead workshops for the developing ensemble. The troupe's first public performance, staged in February 1999, was Maestro (then known as Micetro), a Keith Johnstone format that Hill had encountered through his San Francisco training.

In late spring of 1999, Hill signed a lease on an abandoned pawn shop at 617 Congress Avenue in downtown Austin and began the renovation that would become The Hideout Theatre. The venue opened officially in 2000 as both a performance space and a coffeehouse, a combination that gave it a community gathering function alongside its theatrical programming. Hill co-directed the Hideout's house ensemble We Could Be Heroes alongside Shana Merlin, and the two co-founded the We Could Be Heroes School of Improvisational Theatre at the venue, building a curriculum grounded in Johnstone's Theatresports, Maestro, and Gorilla Theater formats.

Hill ran the Hideout through the 2000s until mid-2009, when his lease on the Congress Avenue property expired and he chose not to renew. He passed the theater to longtime Austin improvisers Roy Janik, Kareem Badr, and Jessica Arjet, who continued its operation for more than fifteen additional years before the building's sale in 2025 required relocation to Art Hub ATX in South Austin.

Following his departure from the Hideout, Hill developed a parallel professional track as a UX designer, executive coach, applied improv facilitator, and writer. He developed and delivered training curricula for organizations including Cisco Systems and the University of Texas McCombs School of Business MBA Program, applying improv-derived principles to communication, leadership, and creative problem-solving in professional contexts. He created the micro-fiction project @VeryShortStory, which accumulated more than 200,000 followers, and published the companion book Very Short Stories: 300 Bite-Size Works of Fiction.

Historical Context

Hill's founding of Austin Theatresports in 1998 and The Hideout Theatre in 1999-2000 introduced the Keith Johnstone Theatresports tradition to Austin at a moment when the city's improv infrastructure was minimal. The Big Stinkin' Improv Comedy Festival had begun building improv awareness in Austin since 1996, but no dedicated improv training program or permanent performance venue existed before Hill established the Hideout. His direct training pipeline from BATS meant that the Austin scene's initial formation drew on the West Coast Theatresports lineage rather than the Harold-focused tradition developing simultaneously at iO and UCB in Chicago and New York.

The Hideout's combination of performance space, coffeehouse, and training school under one roof established a model for integrated improv infrastructure in Austin that gave the scene a physical and communal anchor. Hill's choice of the Johnstone curriculum as the school's pedagogical foundation differentiated Austin's training tradition from Chicago-influenced regional scenes and established the Theatresports format as a foundational element of Austin improv identity during the scene's formative decade.

His decision to pass the theater to practicing improvisers when he chose not to renew his lease in 2009 rather than closing the institution reflected an institutional disposition toward the theater's communal function over its operation as a personal venture. The Hideout's continuous operation for more than 26 years from its founding, through two distinct ownership periods, represents a sustained institutional continuity that Hill's founding work made possible.

Teaching Philosophy

Hill's teaching philosophy draws on his formation in the Keith Johnstone tradition through his training at BATS Improv in San Francisco, applied across both the theatrical performance contexts at the Hideout and the professional development contexts of his subsequent applied improv work. His classroom approach treats offer acceptance, genuine presence, and the collaborative building of shared reality as foundational skills that apply equally in theatrical performance and in professional communication and leadership challenges.

His applied improv facilitation for clients including Cisco Systems and the University of Texas McCombs School of Business MBA Program frames improv's core practices as transferable professional skills, consistent with his stated conviction that improvisation allows ideas to be expressed as fast as they can be thought.

Legacy

The Hideout Theatre, which Hill founded in 1999, operated continuously for more than 26 years as Austin's longest-running improv theater, making it the foundational institution of the city's improv community across two decades of expansion. The infrastructure Hill established at 617 Congress Avenue created the conditions for Austin's subsequent development into one of the more active regional improv scenes in the American South, including the Out of Bounds Improv Festival (founded 2002) and the emergence of additional training institutions including ColdTowne Theater (2006).

The We Could Be Heroes School that Hill and Shana Merlin co-founded at the Hideout trained the first generation of Austin improvisers in the Johnstone tradition, establishing a pedagogical lineage that performers and teachers carried forward as they built their own subsequent careers and institutions. The Hideout's sustained operation through two ownership periods demonstrates the institutional viability of the model Hill established.

His applied improv work, which extended improv-derived principles into professional development contexts for corporate and academic clients, represents an early documented instance of a regional improv theater founder translating theatrical performance training into organizational development practice.