The builders, teachers, and performers behind the form.

1906-1994

Viola Spolin

Teacher

Viola Spolin (1906-1994) was the Chicago educator, director, and author who created the Theater Games system, the foundational pedagogy for improvisational acting in the United States. Trained by social educator Neva Boyd at Hull House and forged through a decade of WPA recreation work in Chicago's immigrant neighborhoods, Spolin developed a method of actor training built on structured play, side-coaching, and a discipline she called spontaneity. Her landmark book, Improvisation for the Theater (1963), translated the games into print and established improv as a teachable practice with its own theory of learning. Through her son Paul Sills, who co-founded the Compass Players and The Second City, her method reached every major American improv institution operating today.

1921-2011

Josephine Forsberg

Founder, Teacher

Josephine Forsberg is a Chicago-based improvisation teacher and theater administrator who trained under Viola Spolin, became Spolin's teaching assistant, and took over the central improvisational teaching role in Chicago when Spolin relocated to the West Coast. In the early 1970s she founded The Players Workshop, widely described as Chicago's first fully structured independent improv school, where she organized exercises into a graduated syllabus, built a faculty, and created a pathway through which large numbers of students could study improvisation outside the Second City company structure. She also helped run the Second City Touring Company, produced children's theatre programming, and in the early 1980s invited David Shepherd back to Chicago, helping create the conditions from which ImprovOlympic would emerge.

1922-2013

Bernie Sahlins

Co-Founder

Bernie Sahlins (1922-2013) was the producer, director, and co-founder of The Second City who transformed Chicago improvisation from an experimental breakthrough into one of the most durable comedy institutions in North America. A University of Chicago graduate who had already produced at the Studebaker Theatre and co-founded Playwrights Theatre Club, Sahlins invested the initial capital to open The Second City on North Wells Street in December 1959 alongside Paul Sills and Howard Alk, then stewarded the company through its most consequential decades of growth. Under his watch, Second City launched the careers of John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, John Candy, Martin Short, and Tina Fey, developed the Toronto company that produced SCTV, and established the producing model that Andrew Alexander extended after purchasing the company in 1985.

1924-2018

David Shepherd

Co-Creator, Co-Founder

David Shepherd (1924-2018) was the producer, organizer, and theatrical visionary who helped found Playwrights Theatre Club and The Compass Players in Chicago in the 1950s, then spent the following six decades advocating for improvisation as a civic and democratic practice. A Harvard-educated New Yorker who hitchhiked to Chicago in 1952, Shepherd conceived the Compass Players as a people's theater modeled on political cabaret and commedia dell'arte, one in which improvisation would make theater responsive to ordinary audiences rather than serve trained performers. He later created the Improvisation Olympics in New York in 1972, co-founded the Canadian Improv Games, and provided the original competitive framework that became ImprovOlympic. The Second City has stated that without David Shepherd there would be no Second City.

1933-2023

Keith Johnstone

Co-Founder, Founder

Keith Johnstone (1933-2023) was the British-Canadian teacher, director, and writer who created one of improv's two major international lineages, distinct from and parallel to the Chicago tradition. Developing his system at London's Royal Court Theatre in the late 1950s and 1960s, then maturing it at the University of Calgary and Loose Moose Theatre Company from 1972 onward, Johnstone built a practice grounded in status dynamics, mask work, narrative play, and competitive formats such as Theatresports. His books Impro (1979) and Impro for Storytellers (1999) became primary texts across dozens of countries, and Theatresports is performed under license in more than thirty nations. For improvisers outside the United States, Johnstone is frequently the foundational figure rather than a secondary one.

1934-1999

Del Close

Artistic Director, Director, Performer

Del Close (1934-1999) was the improviser, director, and teacher most closely associated with the development of long-form improvisation in America. Beginning at the Compass Players in St. Louis in 1957, he passed through multiple tenures at The Second City in Chicago, co-founded The Committee in San Francisco where he developed the earliest versions of the Harold around 1967, and ultimately partnered with Charna Halpern at ImprovOlympic in Chicago from 1982 until his death. His students included John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and the founding members of the Upright Citizens Brigade. He co-authored Truth in Comedy in 1994, codifying the Harold for a generation of long-form practitioners worldwide.

1952

Charna Halpern

Co-Founder, Founder

Charna Halpern (born 1952) is the Chicago producer, teacher, and institution-builder who co-founded ImprovOlympic with Del Close in 1981 and built it into iO Theater, the central Chicago home of long-form improvisation for four decades. Working first in David Shepherd's competition-based framework and then in sustained partnership with Close, Halpern provided the organizational structure, training curriculum, and institutional continuity that transformed the Harold from a workshop experiment into the dominant form in American long-form improv. She co-authored Truth in Comedy (1994) with Close and Kim Howard Johnson, trained Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Chris Farley, and Mike Myers, and facilitated the team pairings that launched the Upright Citizens Brigade.

Mick Napier

Director, Founder, Writer

Mick Napier (born 1962) is the founder of The Annoyance Theatre in Chicago, a director, teacher, and author whose work defined one of the field's most influential counter-traditions to conventional improv pedagogy. Where other schools emphasized agreement, politeness, and inherited rules, Napier built a practice around stronger individual choices, stranger material, and a belief that improvisers become better scene partners by becoming more powerful players rather than more deferential ones. His dual presence inside The Annoyance and The Second City made him one of Chicago's most consequential figures in the debate over what improv should look like and how it should be taught.