Born in 1924 in New York City to an old money family, Shepherd grew up with left-leaning sensibilities. He was the son of Louise Tracy and William Edgar Shepherd, an architect. His paternal grandmother was the sister of socialite Alice Claypoole Vanderbilt. He studied English at Harvard and received an M.A. in the History of Theater at Columbia. Disenchanted with what he perceived as a European dominated theater on the East Coast, Shepherd gravitated to the Midwest. In 1953 Shepherd was one of the co-founders of the Playwrights Theatre Club in Chicago. In 1955 he and Paul Sills founded the Compass Players, the forerunner of The Second City. Compass launched the careers of Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Jerry Stiller, Alan Alda, Alan Arkin, Barbara Harris, and Shelley Berman and started a revolution in entertainment. After Compass, David went on to create numerous improv formats – including the ImprovOlympic, Responsive Scene Radio Show and MOVIExperience which culminated in the publication of his book That Movie In Your Head. More recently he, Howard Jerome and Jamie "Willie" Wyllie created the Canadian Improv Games, a national high school activity inspired by one of Shepherd's formats which is produced in association with Canada's National Arts Centre and which is the subject of the documentary film In The Moment. In addition to leading workshops in Improvisation, Shepherd was involved in developing techniques for the creation of improvisational films with his partner, Nancy Fletcher. Shepherd resided near Amherst, Massachusetts. He actively worked on a new improvisational format known as Life-Play, which consists of improvised games that can be played on the phone or in person by two or more players. In 2010, the David Shepherd: A Lifetime of Improvisational Theatre was completed. This documentary is an oral history detailing the career of Shepherd and his contributions to Improvisational Theatre. The project was the brainchild of Wyllie and directed by Mike Fly, and written by Shepherd's protegee, Michael Golding. The documentary includes interviews with Bernie Sahlins, Suzanne “Honey” Shepherd, Andrew Duncan, Charna Halpern, Janet Coleman, Mark Gordon, Howard Jerome, Golding, and Wyllie. The documentary premiered in 2011 at the 34th Annual Canadian Improv Games and at the Boston Improv Festival. Shepherd's ground-breaking experiments with improvisational formats have, for the most part, been incubated in his company Group Creativity Projects. He received lifetime achievement awards from the Chicago Improv Festival, Second City, and the Canadian Improv Games. Shepherd died on December 17, 2018, at age 94.
