TCG National Conference 2007 - Speaker Bios

Barbara Schaffer Bacon

co-directs Animating Democracy, a program of Americans for the Arts. Launched in fall 1999 with support from the Ford Foundation, Animating Democracy’s purpose is to foster artistic activity that encourages civic dialogue on important contemporary issues and build the capacity of arts and humanities organizations for civic engagement.    Barbara has worked as a consultant since 1990 and prior to that served as executive director of the Arts Extension Service at the University of Massachusetts.  Her work includes program design and evaluation for state and local arts agencies and private foundations nationally. Co-author of Civic Dialogue, Arts & Culture: Findings from Animating Democracy, Barbara has written, edited, and contributed to several publications including Animating Democracy: The Artistic Imagination as a Force for Civic Dialogue, Fundamentals of Local Arts Management and The Cultural Planning Work Kit.  Barbara is a board member of the Fund for Women Artists and an advisor to the New WORLD Theater. She serves as president of the Arts Extension Institute, Inc. and chairs her local school committee.

Mark Bennett

has composed scores and designed sound for the American premieres of new plays by Tom Stoppard, Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, Athol Fugard, Tony Kushner and Caryl Churchill, among many others. Recent Broadway projects include Lincoln Center's The Coast of Utopia and Henry IV (both directed by Jack O'Brien), Golda's Balcony , Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (and West End and on tour), The Goat , and Tartuffe. Additional credits include extensive work Off-Broadway and regionally.  Mark was also the resident composer and sound designer for the Ridiculous Theatrical Company for five years. Mark’s new music-theater piece Most Wanted (Music by Bennett, Book by Jessica Hagedorn, Lyrics by Bennett and Hagedorn) was commissioned by La Jolla Playhouse and is scheduled for production there in Fall 2007.  In addition to a grant from the NEA, it has also received support from the Sundance Institute Theatre Laboratory, the Sundance Playwrights Retreat at the UCross Foundation and the New York Theatre Workshop residency program. He has also been commissioned to write a new musical by the Huntington Theater Company. Other music theatre/musicals include the score for the Music Theatre Group's production of Out of Order and music and co-lyrics (with Everett Quinton) for The Ridiculous Theatrical Company's The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Linda.  In addition, Mark has collaborated on many pieces with choreographer Yoshiko Chuma and has performed them live throughout the US, Europe and Asia. He has composed music for numerous texts by the late Paul Schmidt including Rimbaud's The Drunken Boat , directed by Peter Sellars at the North American New Music Festival, and Mr. Schmidt's translation of Plato's Symposium (The Ghetty, LA/ICA, London) directed by David Schweizer.  He is also the composer of Three for the Road songs with texts by Tim Mayer.  Mark is the recipient of multiple grants from the NEA, NYFA, NYSCA, and the Mary Cary Flagler Charitable Trust.  He received a 1998 OBIE for Sustained Excellence, a New York Dance and Performance (BESSIE) Award for composition, Ovation, Robbie, and Garland Awards.   He has also received eight Drama Desk and two Lucille Lortel Award nominations.  Mark has been a Yamaha Artist since 2002.

Eric Booth

is an author, arts educator, and performing arts consultant.  As an actor, he performed in many plays on Broadway, Off-Broadway and around the country, playing over 23 Shakespearean roles. As a businessman, Eric started a small company, Alert Publishing, which in seven years became the largest of its kind in the U.S. analyzing research on trends in American lifestyles. He was a frequent public spokesperson on trends with three books and regular appearances on CNN, NBC and in major print media.  His fourth book, The Everyday Work of Art, won three awards and was a Book of the Month Club selection. He has written dozens of magazine articles, has a column in Chamber Music magazine, and was the founding editor of the new quarterly Teaching Artist Journal.  Eric is currently on the faculty of The Juilliard School, (where he created the Art and Education program and then the new Mentoring Program) and has taught at Stanford University, NYU, Tanglewood and Lincoln Center Institute (for 25 years). He has given workshops at over 30 universities, and 60 cultural institutions, and has designed and led over twenty research projects, seven online courses and workshops, and he designs three to five national conferences each year.   Eric was the faculty chair of the Empire State Partnership program for three years (the largest arts-in-education project in America), and held one of six chairs on The College Board’s Arts Advisory Committee for seven years. He serves as a consultant for many organizations, cities and states and businesses around the country, including seven of the ten largest orchestras in the country. Formerly the director of the Teacher Center of the Leonard Bernstein Center (now on the board of directors), Eric is a frequent keynote speaker on the arts to groups of all kinds.

Laurie Brooks

is an award-winning playwright and drama specialist whose innovative After-Play Forums are changing the way theatres engage audiences in post-performance experiences across the country. Awards and grants include TCG’s National Theatre Artist Residency Program (with Coterie Theatre, Kansas City, MO, funded by Pew Charitable Trusts), AT&T Firststage award, two Distinguished Play Awards and the Charlotte Chorpenning Cup from AATE, NY Foundation for the Arts, and the Irish Arts Council. Brooks’ Lies and Deceptions Quartet for young adults includes The Wrestling Season, commissioned by Coterie Theatre, featured at the Kennedy Center One Theatre World, printed in the November 2000 issue of American Theatre, and winner of “Best of “awards in Seattle, Kansas City and Dallas, both for the play and the forum that follows it. Additional plays include Deadly Weapons, The Tangled Web, Everyday Heroes, Selkie, Devon’s Hurt, The Match Girl’s Gift, Franklin’s Apprentice, The Lost Ones and Brave No World. Brooks has worked extensively in Ireland and has been professor, playwright in residence and literary manager (Provincetown Playhouse) at New York University. She has served as playwright in residence for HYPE Institute at the Alley Theatre in Houston since 2002. Her article, "Put A Little Boal in Your Theatre: A New Model for Talkbacks" appeared in the December 2006 issue of American Theatre. Brooks’ first book for young adults is forthcoming from Knopf in 2008. Her website is www.lauriebrooks.com.

Steven Cosson 

is a theatre director specializing in original work, new plays and musicals. He founded The Civilians in 2001, a company that creates original theater from investigations into real life. With The Civilians: (I Am) Nobody’s Lunch, which was recently published by Oberon Books in the UK,  Gone Missing, and Canard, Canard, Goose?. In development: Neal Bell’s Shadow of Himself, Paris Commune, written with Michael Friedman, and a new verbatim play, Colorado Springs, about Evangelical Christianity in Colorado Springs. The Civilians work has been produced at theatres such as A.R.T., Actors Theatre of Louisville, La Jolla Playhouse, HBO’s Aspen Comedy Festival, London’s Gate Theatre and Soho Theatre, Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms (Fringe First award), and at university arts presenters throughout the country. The company’s plays have been developed with The Public Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, and The Sundance Institute Theatre Laboratory among others. Outside of The Civilians, he is currently commissioned by The Foundry Theatre to create an original non-fiction play. He also directed new play workshops including Elise Thoron and Jill Sobule’s Prozak and the Platypus at Hartford Stage, Tommy Smith’s Air Conditioning at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Mat Smart’s The 13th of Paris at the New Harmony Theatre. Other directing credits: Serious Money by Caryl Churchill for Carnegie Mellon’s BFA program; the U.S. premiere of Attempts on Her Life by Martin Crimp at Soho Rep; U.S. premiere of The Square Root of Minus One at The Market Theater in Cambridge,  The Communist Dracula Pageant by Anne Washburn, and Marge by Peter Morris both at Soho Rep; The Importance of Being Earnest for ACT Conservatory’s MFA acting program; and The Time of Your Life at Williamstown Theatre Festival. In San Francisco, he directed the U.S. premiere of Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love, world premiere of Erik Ehn’s Tailings, John C. Russell’s Stupid Kids and In the Dark. Cosson wrote and directed Close to Shore for the San Diego Repertory Theatre, created from a six-month residency in a multi-ethnic San Diego neighborhood. He also wrote and directed Fingered, a response to The Children’s Hour, LA’s Common Ground Festival and San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center. Steve was a resident director at New Dramatists (2003-2004), received a 2004 Obie grant for The Civilians, a MacDowell Fellow (2003), participated in the NEA/TCG Career Development Program for Directors (2000-2002), was a Boris Sagal Fellow at Williamstown Theatre (1999), and a Fulbright Scholar in Bogotá, Colombia (1992). He holds an MFA in directing from UC San Diego, and a BA in drama from Dartmouth College. 

Joe Dowling

Guthrie Theater Artistic Director, is widely known for his association with the Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s national theater.  While still a student at University College in Dublin he became a member of the Abbey’s acting company where he played many leading roles.  In 1970 he founded The Young Abbey, Ireland’s first theater-in-education group.  In 1973 he became artistic director of the Peacock Theatre, the Abbey’s second stage, where he began his directing career and, in 1976, he was appointed artistic director of the national touring company, the Irish Theatre Company.  In 1978 at the age of 29 he became the youngest-ever artistic director of the Abbey Theatre.  His tenure is particularly remembered for the encouragement and development of new plays and young playwrights.  After leaving the Abbey in 1985, Mr. Dowling became managing and artistic director of Dublin’s oldest commercial theater, The Gaiety Theatre. While there he founded and directed The Gaiety School of Acting, now widely regarded as Ireland’s premier drama school.  Since 1990 he has directed extensively in North America including The Price, She Stoops to Conquer and Juno and the Paycock (Helen Hayes Award nomination) at Arena Stage; The School for Scandal, Julius Caesar and Macbeth at The Shakespeare Theatre; Othello with Raul Julia and Christopher Walken at the New York Shakespeare Festival; A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The Acting Company; A Touch of the Poet at American Repertory Theatre; Philadelphia, Here I Come!, London Assurance and Tartuffe at the Roundabout Theatre on Broadway; Juno and the Paycock on Broadway and at the International Edinburgh Festival and Israel; A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Uncle Vanya at the Stratford Festival in Ontario; The Plough and the Stars and The School for Scandal at The Banff Centre; and Our Country’s Good and Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Toward the Somme at Centaur Theatre in Montreal. While serving as artistic director of the Guthrie, he was invited to direct The Cripple of Inishman at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles (1998); The Man Who Came to Dinner at the Chichester Festival Theater in England (1999); A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier (2000); All My Sons for the Abbey Theatre (2003); and Dancing at Lughnasa at the Gate (2004).  Since coming to the Guthrie in 1995, he has directed numerous mainstage productions, including The Cherry Orchard, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Blithe Spirit, The Playboy of the Western World, Much Ado About Nothing, The Importance of Being Earnest, The School for Scandal, Julius Caesar, The Plough and the Stars, Twelfth Night, Amadeus, All My Sons, The Three Sisters, Pride and Prejudice, The Pirates of Penzance, Death of a Salesman (which toured to the Dublin Theatre Festival 2004) , As You Like It, His Girl Friday, Hamlet, The Real Thing, The Glass Menagerie, The Boys and most recently The Merchant of Venice. Mr. Dowling also directed Molly Sweeney, The Invention of Love, and Othello at the Guthrie Lab.  His signature production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which marked the Guthrie’s return to touring after a decade, was enthusiastically received throughout the region in 2000.  Also on tour, directorial credits include Molly Sweeney (2001) hosted by over 30 cities in seven states, and Othello (2004) which toured nationally as part of the National Endowment for the Arts’  “Shakespeare in American Communities” initiative.  Mr. Dowling is a member of the Artistic Directorate of the Globe Theatre in London, and holds an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from The University of St. Thomas, St.Paul MN, and St. Johns University Collegeville, MN as well as an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the National University of Ireland, and an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from Gonzaga University.

Teresa Eyring 

is the executive director for TCG. She has been an executive in theaters around the U.S. for over twenty years. Since September 1999, she has served as managing director of the Children’s Theatre Company (CTC) in Minneapolis, recipient of the 2003 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theater. During her tenure there, CTC completed a $30 million capital campaign and opened a new 45,000 square foot facility to expand its education programs and to produce plays for pre-schoolers and teens. Eyring began her theater career as director of development for the Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in Washington, D.C. in 1983. She completed an MFA in theater administration at the Yale School of Drama between 1986 and 1989. From 1989-1993, she was assistant executive director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis , where she oversaw a $5 million theater renovation project. From 1994-99, she was managing director of the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, where she spearheaded completion of an $8 million capital campaign and oversaw the construction and transition to a new 24,000 square foot theater facility on Philadelphia’s Avenue of the Arts. Eyring was named a ‘Woman to Watch” by the Twin Cities Business Journal in July 2005. She serves on the boards of Ten Thousand Things Theatre Company and CostumeRentals, LLC (a joint venture of the Guthrie Theater and The Children's Theatre Company); the Ivey Awards, (the Twin Cities’ theater awards); and KARE-11’s Eleven Who Care Awards. She is co-executive director of Plays for Young Audiences, a script licensing venture of The Children's Theatre Company and the Seattle Children’s Theatre. She is a member of the Minnesota Women’s Economic Roundtable, and is also an adjunct faculty member of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Eyring’s past affiliations include service as chairwoman of the Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia, board member of WYBE-TV, executive committee member of the League of Resident Theaters; board member and Treasurer of Minnesota Citizens for the Arts; and board member of  Intermedia Arts. She holds a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from Yale School of Drama.

 

Michael Friedman

is the c omposer and lyricist for The Civilians’ [I Am] Nobody’s Lunch, Gone Missing, Canard, Canard, Goose? and upcoming Colorado Springs, as well as The Brand New Kid and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. His music has also been heard at NYSF/Public Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, Playwrights Horizons, Roundabout Theatre Company, Second Stage, Soho Rep, Theater for a New Audience, Signature Theatre Company and The Acting Company, and regionally at The Kennedy Center, The Huntington, La Jolla Playhouse, Hartford Stage, Humana Festival, ART, Williamstown Theatre Festival, and internationally at London’s Soho and Gate Theatres, and the Edinburgh Festival. Film work includes On Common Ground and Affair Game. He was the dramaturg for the recent Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun, directed by Kenny Leon. He is an artistic associate at New York Theatre Workshop, was a MacDowell fellow, and is a founding associate artist of the Obie-Award-winning Civilians.

Sue Frost

was the associate producer at Goodspeed Musicals for 20 years, where she produced more than 50 new musicals at both the Goodspeed Opera House and the Norma Terris Theatre.  Many of these new musicals have gone on to Broadway, off-Broadway and regional theatres around the country.  She is proud to have established, in conjunction with the NYU Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program, an annual residency for composers, lyricists and librettists at the Goodspeed as well as the pilot program for Goodspeed’s Musical Theatre Institute.  Prior to Goodspeed she worked as a company manager on several Broadway shows and tours includingA Chorus Line , Dancin' and The Rink .  In addition to chairing two New American Works panels for the late Opera-Music Theatre Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, Sue has served as a panelist and/or site evaluator for the NEA, the Philadelphia Theatre Institute, the Connecticut Commission for the Arts and Tourism, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the TCG/Pew National Theatre Artist Residency Program.  She was recently recognized by the Association of Authors’ Representatives for her dedication to new writers of new musicals, and was honored with a lifetime achievement award from the Spirit of Broadway Theatre.  A graduate of Smith College, Sue is past president of the National Alliance for Musical Theatre, currently serves as a Tony nominator, and is a founding partner of Junkyard Dog Productions, a theatrical producing organization dedicated to the development and production of new musical theatre. 

Clove Galilee

is co-artistic director of her theater company, Trick Saddle.  An actor, choreographer, and director, she has presented work in New York at PS 122, the Public Theater, The Performing Garage, Arts at Saint Ann’s, HERE, PS 1 Center For Contemporary Art/ MOMA and The Skirball Center.  Clove is a TCG New Generations Fellow and a Princess Grace Foundation- USA Fellowship recipient.  Her work is supported by the Greenwall Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.  Her company, Trick Saddle with collaborator Jenny Rogers developed and produced the company’s inaugural piece Trick Saddle at PS 122 in 2003.  Their upcoming piece, WICKETS, a radical adaptation of Maria Irene Fornes’ Fefu and Her Friends set in an airplane at 30,000 feet and performed by 1970’s stewardesses was adapted and directed by Jenny Rogers and had work-in-progress performances in August 2006 at Mabou Mines Toronada Theater and in January 2007 at HERE Center for the Arts Culturemart Festival.  WICKETS will open for a five-week run in NYC at Three-Legged Dog January 11, 2008 where Jenny and Clove will be Artist-in-Residents.  In 2005 Clove choreographed as well as performed the title role in Mabou Mines’ Red Beads at NYU’s Skirball Center.  Recently she returned from three months in Greece where she choreographed an adaptation of The Libation Bearers entitled Choephorae with Theater Armadillo in Athens, Greece.  Upcoming projects include choreography and direction of james Joyce’s The Dead and Accelerated English, Trick Saddle’s  Evangelical Our Town directed and adapted by Jenny Rogers.

Rha Goddess

is a world renowned performance artist/activist known for her trademark style-Flowetry.   Her work has appeared on several national and international compilations including the critically acclaimed Eargasms, (Manic/Mercury), and A Rose That Grew From Concrete (Interscope), a musical tribute to the poetry of Tupac Shakur.  In 2000, Rha’s debut solo project, Soulah Vibe, received rave industry reviews and Essence Magazine named her one of 30 Women To Watch. She has been a featured performing artist in:  URB03 festival, ACT 2001 2004 Festivals, Double Talk Festival, BAM’s Next Wave Festival, Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monlogues VDay Gathering, the NGO forum- World Conference Against Racism, Omega Institute’s Women & Power Summit, Bioneers Conference, New World Theater’s Project 2050 and New Works Festival and Intersections Conference. She is currently working on a solo theatrical project Meditations With The Goddess and We Got Issues a theatrical collaboration that focuses on young women and electoral politics.  

Jessica Hagedorn

was born in the Philippines and came to the U.S. in her teens. Recent plays include Fe In The Desert, Stairway To Heaven and the stage adaptation of Dogeaters, which has been presented at La Jolla Playhouse, at the NYSF/Public Theater, and at the Kirk Douglas Theater in Culver City. A Manila production is slated for 2007. Upcoming projects: Most Wanted, with composer Mark Bennett and director Michael Greif at La Jolla Playhouse and Three Vampires, a collaboration with director Ping Chong. Published work includes Dream Jungle, Danger And Beauty, The Gangster Of Love, and Dogeaters, which was nominated for a National Book Award in Fiction. Prizes and honors include the 2006 Lucille Lortel Playwrights’ Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fiction Fellowship, a Kesselring Prize Honorable Mention for Dogeaters, an NEA/TCG Theatre Residency Program for Playwrights Grant, as well as fellowships from the Sundance Playwrights Retreat and the Sundance Screenwriters’ Lab.

Joseph Haj

is the Producing Artistic Director at PlayMakers Repertory Company. He has directed The Illusion, Cyrano de Bergerac (also adapted), and Not About Heroes for PlayMakers; As You Like It and Metamorphoses for the Clarence Brown Theatre; The Roads That Lead Here for Actors Theatre of Louisville; Henry the Fifth with maximum-security inmates of the California State Prison / Los Angeles County and Voices with members of the community of Batesburg-Leesville, SC. Joseph has also conducted workshops with Palestinian and Israeli actors in the West Bank and Gaza. As an actor he has worked with JoAnne Akalaitis, Anne Bogart (original member of the SITI Company), Peter Sellars, Robert Woodruff, Garland Wright, Michael Grief, Sir Peter Hall, Jon Jory and others. He has worked at the Guthrie Theater, The Alley Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Mark Taper Forum, The Ahmanson, The New York Shakespeare Festival, as well as in Salzburg, Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin, Venice, and Japan. Recent TV appearances include 24, Without a Trace, Navy NCIS, Crossing Jordan and Charmed. He is the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Millennium Grant and a previous participant in the NEA/TCG Career Development Program for Directors.

Tina Landau  

is a writer and director, and co-author with Anne Bogart of The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition (TCG). Her work as writer and director include Theatrical Essays (Steppenwolf), Beauty (La Jolla Playhouse), Space (NYSF/Public Theater, Mark Taper Forum, Steppenwolf), Floyd Collins (Playwrights Horizons, the Goodman Theatre, the Old Globe, AMTF), Dream True (Vineyard Theater), States of Independence (AMTF), Stonewall (En Garde Arts) and 1969 (Humana Festival). Other directing credits include the Broadway revival of Bells are Ringing as well as many productions regionally and at Steppenwolf Theater, where she is an ensemble member. These include, most recently, Mary Rose (Vineyard), Midsummer Night’s Dream (McCarter/Papermill) and Diary of Anne Frank, Cherry Orchard, Time of Your Life (also Seattle Rep. A.C.T), Ballad of Little Jo, and Berlin Circle ( Steppenwolf.) Tina has taught at Yale School of Drama, Columbia University, NYU, Northwestern, University of Chicago, UCSD and many others.

Young Jean Lee

has directed her plays at HERE Arts Center (Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven), P.S. 122 (Pullman, WA), Soho Rep (The Appeal), and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals). She has worked with Radiohole (None of It) and performed with the National Theater of the United States of America (What's That On My Head?!?). She is a member of New Dramatists and 13P, a resident artist at HERE Arts Center and Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), and has an MFA from Mac Wellman's playwriting program at Brooklyn College. Her plays have been published in New Downtown Now (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), an anthology edited by Mac Wellman and herself, and in Three Plays by Young Jean Lee (Samuel French, 2006). She is the recipient of grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Rockefeller MAP Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation. She has directed Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven at the Walker Art Center, the Wexner Center, and the Warhol Museum, and will direct it at The Vienna Festival, Theaterformen in Hannover, Zurich’s Theater Spektakel, The Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, PICA, Berlin’s Hebbel Theater, and multiple venues in France in 2007, and at Brussels’ Kaaitheater and On the Boards in 2008. She will direct The Shipment at The Kitchen in April 2008. She will direct her new play CHURCH at PS 122 from April 26-May 12, 2007, with two workshop performances at BAX.

John Malpede

founded the Los Angeles Poverty Department in 1985.  Comprised primarily of homeless and formerly homeless people, LAPD 's mission is to create performances that connect lived experience to the social  forces that shape the lives and communities of people living in poverty.   Malpede has directed projects working with communities throughout the US and in Europe. Malpede’s RFK in EKY, was produced by Appalshop in 2004. This real-time documentary-style performance  recreated Kennedy’s field  investigation of Appalachian poverty, following his route and  itinerary in the course of a four-day, 200 mile series of events that included performance, installations,  and discussion of social policy. Malpede is a 2007-8 fellow at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies and a member of the Appalshop Film Union, where he is making a documentary of RFK in EKY.  As an actor, he recently played Antonin Artaud in theater director Peter Sellars’ production  of For An End to the Judgment of God.  His work with LAPD is the subject of two documentary films.  He has received awards, individual artist fellowships and numerous project grants.

Kristin Marting

has constructed twenty works for the stage over the past twenty years, including eight original dance-theatre pieces, eight new adaptations of novels and short stories and four classic plays. Recent projects include co-creation with Juliet Chia and David Morris and direction of a collaborative alternative musical, Orpheus, based on the Greek myth; also with Chia and Morris, she developed and directed Erendira, a hybrid performance work adapted from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother; direction of James Scruggs’s solo work Disposable Men (winner of a NY Innovative Theatre Award) and his recent new play Rus; Dead Tech a collaborative, site-specific theatrical collage based on The Master Builderby Henrik Ibsen and architectural texts. For the last ten years, she has been developing a unique hybrid directorial/ choreographic form that features a "gestural vocabulary" used both as an emotional signifier and as a choreographic element. This vocabulary, though specific to each project, is in a state of constant development with an ever-growing set of permanent gestures being added to the repertoire. She is a co-founder and the artistic director of HERE, where she cultivates artists and programs all events for two performance spaces--including eight OBIE-award winners--for an annual audience of 50,000. She created and curates HARP, HERE’s Artist Residency Program; THE AMERICAN LIVING ROOM, an annual summer festival featuring over thirty new works by emerging artists; and for eight years, she curated QUEER@HERE, an annual festival of gay and lesbian work. She regularly serves on grant panels for TCG and the New York State Council on the Arts, among others. In 2005, she was honored with a 2005 BAX10 Award for Arts Managers. She graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with honors in 1988. She has lectured at New York University and Playwrights Horizons Theatre School and has been a guest artist and teaching fellow at Harvard University’s Drama Program and New York University, among others.

Ruben Polendo

is artistic director of Theater Mitu; applauded as “one of the ten top, hot companies in New York” and “exciting…outside the boundaries of standard Western drama” (The New York Times). Polendo has written and directed several works with his company including: Moonchild; The Legend of The Kinnaree; The Ramayana; The Mahabharata; The Odyssey. Adaptations include Hamletmachine; The Shakespeare Project; The Noh Cycle; The Tutor; Four Saints in Mexico; Dhammashok (developed at the Sundance Theater Lab/presented at The Mark Taper Forum’s ON STAGE series). This past year Mitu produced Ahraihsak in New York as well as premiering two pieces in Bangkok, Thailand. Most recently Mitu (in collaboration with New York’s Skirball Center) staged an adaptation of the musical Hair. Polendo’s work has been seen at various theaters including: NYTW, The Public Theater, INTAR, Blue Light, Lincoln Center, A.C.T., McCarter, Mark Taper Forum, Alliance Theatre, ETC and South Coast Repertory. Polendo holds a Biochemistry Degree (Trinity University), an MFA in directing (UCLA) and an MA in non-Western theatre (Lancaster University, UK). Polendo is director of Mitu’s Bangkok Artist Intensive. He and various company members teach Mitu’s Training Methodology called Whole Theater at several institutions including NYU (adjunct professor), Juilliard, Bard, CCM, University of Mexico. Ruben Polendo is Artistic Associate at NYTW where Theater Mitu is presently Company-in-Residence.

Kathy Randels

a native New Orleanian, is a performer and the founding artistic director of ArtSpot Productions, which celebrated its ten-year anniversary in December 2006 with Artistic Ancestry: an International Festival of Alternative Theatre at New Orleans’ Contemporary Arts Center.  Randels has written, performed in, and directed numerous original solo and collaborative works, for professional and student ensembles; her pieces have toured throughout the world.  She has collaborated on several performances with Dah Teatar of Belgrade, Serbia, and is a member of The Magdalena Project.  In 1996, she founded the LCIW Drama Club at The Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women in St. Gabriel, Louisiana, and has taught theatre and performance in the New Orleans public school system since 1995. Her most recent original work, Beneath the Strata/Disappearing, premiered at A Studio in the Woods in October 2006, and is a site-specific performance installation examining the threat posed to southeast Louisiana’s unique cultures by the accelerating disappearance of coastal wetlands.  Randels is also creating a new work for Home, New Orleans? that will be set in her childhood neighborhood of Lakeview, which was destroyed by a levee breach in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  Randels is proud to be a part of Alternate Roots’ UPROOTED: The Katrina Project, which is touring the U.S. this year.  Visit www.artspotproductions.org for more information.

Michael Rohd

is a playwright/director/performer who frequently leads community-engaged, collaborative devising projects. He is the founding artistic director of Sojourn Theatre in Portland, Oregon, an associate artist with Cornerstone Theater and an artistic associate with Ping Chong & Company. Recent civic engagement/performance projects include work with Portland’s Mayor, San Jose’s Teatro Vision & the Australia Arts Council. Upcoming production work includes: The Buffalo Bill Project (with Ping Chong); The Race: 2008 (with Georgetown University); and with Sojourn, Where Will We Live? a civic theatre project in Chicago, & GOOD, the company’s Summer 2007 Brecht-inflected site-specific performance journey through Oregon’s oldest car dealership. He is author of the book Theatre for Community, Conflict, and Dialogue, and currently a guest faculty member at Northwestern University.

Dan Rothenberg

is a Philadelphia-based director and creator of experimental performance. Dan studied at Swarthmore College and Ecole Jacques Lecoq.  A founding member and co-artistic director of the Pig Iron Theatre Company, Dan has directed almost all of Pig Iron’s original performance works, including Poet in New York, Gentlemen Volunteers, Love Unpunished, The Lucia Joyce Cabaret, and the OBIE Award-winning Hell Meets Henry Halfway. Pig Iron has been nominated for over 35 Barrymore Awards for Excellence in Theater in Philadelphia, and the company has toured to theatres and festivals in Europe, South America, and the United States. In 2001, Dan co-directed Shut Eye with Joseph Chaikin.  In 2005, Dan directed Pay Up, a 30-person site-specific installation about buying and selling for the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. Dan teaches physical theatre for Pig Iron and at Princeton University.  Current collaborations include the creation of a one-man show about Joe Hill with Teatr Slava in Stockholm, Sweden, and the creation of audio works to accompany the paintings of Alexandra Grant at MOCA in L.A.  Dan is the recipient of a Pew Fellowship (2002) and an Independence Fellowship (2005).

Sean San José

is a native of San Francisco and works for Intersection for the Arts as the artistic director of their resident theatre company Campo Santo. Since 1996 they have presented more than 30 premiere productions, developing and producing the first plays of Denis Johnson, Jimmy Baca, Junot Diaz, Dave Eggers, Greg Sarris, Vendela Vida, and others as well as sustaining long term relationships with Philip Kan Gotanda, Jessica Hagedorn, Naomi Iizuka, Octavio Solis, Erin Cressida Wilson, all writing especially for the company. He conceived Pieces of the Quilt, a collection of new short plays confronting the AIDS epidemic; and created Alma Delfina Group~Teatro Contra el SIDA to present benefit performances in theatres, schools, clinics and community centers. Begun as an homage to his parents who died of AIDS, the collection includes an ever growing group of over 35 writers, with currently over 70 plays to be used and performed solely as benefit events. San José's work is dedicated to his mother, Delfina.

Steven Sater's

plays include the long-running Carbondale Dreams, Perfect for You, Doll (Rosenthal Prize, Cincinnati Playhouse), Umbrage (Steppenwolf New Play Prize), A Footnote to the Iliad (New York Stage and Film, The Miniature Theatre of Chester), Asylum (Naked Angels), Murder at the Gates (commissioned by Eye of the Storm), In Search of Lost Wings (Sanford Meisner) and a reconceived version of Shakespeare's The Tempest, with music by Laurie Anderson, which played London's Lyric Hammersmith and toured throughout Britain. In addition to Spring Awakening, Sater has collaborated with alt-rocker Duncan Sheik on the NY premiere of Umbrage (HERE), Nero: Another Golden Rome (The Magic Theatre), and The Nightingale (commissioned by Martin McCallum, work-shopped both at the O’Neill Musical Theatre Conference and La Jolla Playhouse, forthcoming in La Jolla’s 2007 season). He is the lyricist for Sheik's critically-acclaimed album Phantom Moon (Nonesuch), and together the two wrote the songs for Michael Mayer's feature film A Home at the End of the World (Warner Classics) as well as the independent feature Brother’s Shadow. Steven is co-creator and executive producer, with Paul Reiser, of recent pilots for both NBC and Sony/FX, and has developed two projects for HBO, and another for Showtime (with Reiser). He is also at work, with Jessie Nelson, on a feature film for New Line. Together they have also recently completed a rewrite of the Warner Bros animated feature, C Horse. In addition, Steven continues to work as a lyricist with a variety of composers in the pop/rock world.

Molly Smith

is the artistic director at Arena Stage. She has been a passionate leader in new play development for the past 30 years at Arena Stage and Perseverance Theatre in Alaska, the theatre she founded and led for 19 years. During nine seasons as Arena's artistic director, she has focused the repertory on American voices, making Arena the largest theatre in North America focusing on American writers. She founded Arena's downstairs series, which has read and workshopped some sixty plays, half of which have gone on to full productions. Ms. Smith has commissioned or championed numerous world premieres including Paula Vogel's Pulitzer Prize-winning How I Learned to Drive and Mineola Twins, Tim Acito’s The Women of Brewster Place, Moises Kaufman’s 33 Variations, Charles Randolph-Wright's Blue, Zora Neale Hurston's lost American play Polk County and Passion Play, a cycle by Sarah Ruhl. Her directorial work has also been seen at the Shaw Festival in Canada, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Trinity Repertory Company, Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, and Centaur Theatre in Montreal, and includes classics such as South Pacific, Mack and Mabel, Anna Christie and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Smith has served as literary advisor to the Sundance Theatre Lab and formed the Arena Stage Writers Council, comprised of leading American playwrights. An avid traveler, Ms. Smith brings artists of international renown to work at Arena Stage and serves as a member of the Board of the TCG as well as the Center for International Theatre Development. She directed two feature films, Raven's Blood and Making Contact, and received Honorary Doctorates from both Towson and American Universities.

 

Wole Soyinka

is a playwright, poet, novelist, and essayist. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, Wole Soyinka has published more than thirty works, and remains active in various international artistic and Human Rights organizations.  Born and educated in Nigeria, Soyinka continued his studies at the University of Leeds, England, then joined the Royal Court Theatre, London as a play-reader. In 1960, he returned to Nigeria, where he founded two theatre companies – The 1960 Masks, and the Orisun Theatre. Soyinka writes in various genres – from the light comedy of cultures in The Lion and the Jewel, through King Baabu, a savagely satiric adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s  Ubu Roi, to the dense poetic tragedy of  Death and the King’s Horseman. Soyinka has also written novels and autobiographical works. Aké: The Years of Childhood  has been described as a classic, while his latest, You Must Set Forth at Dawn was acclaimed one of the best non-fiction works of 2006.  Literary and thematic essay collections include his 2004 BBC Reith Lectures, Climate of Fear, while his most recent collection of poems  was published as SAMARKAND and Other Markets I have Known.  Wole Soyinka has held several university positions, and still lectures extensively. He is currently Professor Emeritus in Comparative Literature, Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria, and Fellow of the Black Mountain Institute, University of Nevada, and the Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge.

 

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