Keynote speakers have included:
Guest faculty and experts have included:
Home | How To Apply | About the Program | Past Fellows | Faculty & Experts | Schedules | Press | Staff | FAQ
Luis Alfaro
2005
Luis Alfaro’s artistic and professional background includes plays, poetry, short stories, performance and journalism. A Chicano, born and raised in downtown Los Angeles, he is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He was a resident artist at the Mark Taper Forum, where he was co-director of the Latino Theatre Initiative. He was a visiting artist to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and has toured his work throughout the United States, England, and Mexico. His film, Chicanismo, was Emmy-nominated and won Best Experimental Film at San Antonio’s CineFestival. He is the winner of the 1998 National Hispanic Playwriting Competition and the 1994 and 1997 Midwest Play Labs. As an activist, he works with at-risk youth, is co-founder of three nonprofit arts organizations, and chaired the Gay Men of Color Consortium.
Return to top
Hilton Als
2010
Hilton Als became a staff writer at The New Yorker in November, 1996, and a theatre critic in 2002. He began contributing to the magazine in 1989, writing pieces for “The Talk of the Town.” Before coming to The New Yorker, Als was a staff writer for the Village Voice and an editor-at-large at Vibe. He has also written articles for The Nation and collaborated on film scripts for “Swoon” and “Looking for Langston.” Als edited the catalogue for the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition entitled “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art,” which ran from November, 1994, to March, 1995. His first book, “The Women,” a meditation on gender, race, and personal identity, was published in 1996. In 1997, the New York Association of Black Journalists awarded Als first prize in both Magazine Critique/Review and Magazine Arts and Entertainment. He was awarded a Guggenheim for Creative Writing in 2000 and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2002-03. Als lives in New York City.
Return to top
Misha Berson
2005 • 2006 • 2007 • 2008
Misha Berson is the head theater critic of the Seattle Times, a position she has held since 1992. Previously, she was the drama critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Bay Area's biggest circulation weekly paper, from 1980 through 1991. She is also a frequent contributor to American Theatre Magazine and has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Stagebill, Playbill, The Drama Review and many other publications. She is the author of the award-winning, two-volume historical work, The San Francisco Stage (published by the Performing Arts Library and Museum), and the critical anthology Between Worlds: Contemporary Asian-American Plays (Theatre Communications Group). Berson has won numerous Society for Professional Journalism awards, and has been a National Arts Journalism Fellow at ColumbiaUniversity, and a panelist and evaluator for the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. She has taught arts and journalism courses at University of Washington, San FranciscoStateUniversity and University of California Davis, and gave the keynote address at the American Theatre Critics Association 2004 annual conference. Her arts administration experience includes stints as executive director of the service organization Theatre Bay Area, and performing arts director of the FortMasonCenter, both in San Francisco.
Return to top
John H. Binkley
2010
John H. Binkley, scenic designer, has been designing for the theatre for 15 years. Most recently, he has designed Oedipus el Rey for The Theatre @ Boston Court; Marry Me A Little/ The Last Five Years and Joy Luck Club at East West Players; Once On This Island for Reprise Theatre Company; and Dogeaters for the Kirk Douglas Theatre. Other southern California credits include Hero, Conjunto, Harvest, Failure of Nerve, Gumsimao, Sleepwalk, Moscow, and Atomic Quintet for Playwrights’ Arena; Elegies – A Song Cycle, War Letters for The Cannon Theatre; Shim Ch’ong for The Getty Center; Happy End for the Museum of Contemporary Art; Stage Direction for Ensemble Studio Theatre; and Slide, Ghost Stories for The Wilton Project. Regionally, John has designed for the Dallas Theatre Center, Idaho Repertory Theatre, and Summer Repertory Theatre. International credits include Beachwood Drive for “Theatre Confrontations” in Lublin, Poland, Pterodactyls for “Experimental Theatre Festival in Shanghai, China, and Shim Ch’ong for National Theatre of Korea in Seoul, Korea. John received a BackStage West Garland 1998 for Scenic Design for two productions produced in Equity-waiver theatres in Los Angeles: Patience by the Antaeus Company and Slide produced by the Wilton Project. In 2001 he was chosen as a finalist in the National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group career development grant for designers. And in 2002 he was nominated for an Ovation Award for his design work in Street Stories. John has be a member of the faculty at California State University Northridge since 2001.
Return to top
Bob Blackburn
2010
Bob Blackburn, sound designer, his recent productions include How I Learned to Drive, Ruby, Tragically Rotund, Some Kind Of Love Story, Sea Change, Hillary Agonistes, The Concept of Remainders and M. Butterfly. Bob has designed over 85 shows in L.A. theatres over the last 15 years, 30+ with Jon Lawrence Rivera. He is a three time Ovation Award nominee and two time winner, for Request Concert in 1998 and Street Stories in 2002. He would like to thank Jon, Tim, Meg, Nathan and this great cast and crew, and would like to dedicate his work to his father who passed away in January while we were working on the show.
Return to top
Irene Borger
2009 • 2010
Irene Borger, writer and teacher, leads private workshops in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco and, since 1990, has served as a consultant to wellness institutes. Her work has appeared in many publications including the Los Angeles Times, Vogue, O, Architectural Digest, and on The Wall Street Journal arts page. The director of the Alpert Award in the Arts, Irene oversees the giving of five annual $75,000 grants to outstanding artists working nationally in dance, film/video, music, theatre and the visual arts. Her conversations with 19 of these artists are the subject of the book, “The Force of Curiosity.” The founder of the Writing Program at AIDS Project Los Angeles, the country’s second-largest AIDS service agency, and artist-in-residence there for ten years, she is the editor of “From a Burning House: The AIDS Project Los Angeles Writers Workshop Collection,” published by Washington Square Press/Pocket Books; the audiotape version was nominated for a Grammy in the Spoken Word category. A Bennington College graduate, with an M.A. in dance ethnology from UCLA, Irene is a former member of the dance history faculty at University of California, Riverside. A longtime meditation student, she is working on a book on the creative mind.
Return to top
Kenneth S. Brecher
2009
Kenneth S. Brecher is the executive director of the Sundance Institute. He previously served as president of the William Penn Foundation in Philadelphia, director of the Boston Children’s Museum, and associate artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. He was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University and is an honors graduate of Cornell. An anthropologist by training, Brecher has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including a research grant from the Getty Center for Education in the Arts and a Ford Foundation Fellowship for his study of Amazonian tribesmen in Brazil. He serves on a number of boards and is a Trustee of the Wildwood School in Los Angeles. He is a member of the International Arts Advisory Council for the Wexner Center for the Arts, served as Chair of the Lillian and Dorothy Gish Prize and is on the Committee of Selection for the Rhodes Scholarships. Brecher has lectured and published widely and served as an international consultant on current challenges facing arts leadership. He is the author of Too Sad to Sing, A Memoir with Postcards published by Harcourt, and edited the classic work, Xingu: The Indians and Their Myths, by the legendary Brazilian brothers Orlando and Claudio Villas Boas. His installation, "The Little Room of Epiphanies," was at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2006.
Return to top
Susan Brenneman
2010 • 2011
Susan Brenneman is the deputy Op Ed editor of the Los Angeles Times. She has been the Times’ arts editor, a senior editor and the executive editor of the Los Angeles Times Magazine, the founding editor of a new Sunday magazine for the San Francisco Examiner, and an editor at Rolling Stone, Outside, Rocky Mountain Magazine, Women’s Sports and a strange little travel magazine she started called Golden State. She has also edited or managing-edited books: “The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll,” “The Sixties,” “Sushi,” “More New Games,” and “The Official Book of the Deadheads.”
Return to top
Mark Briggs
2009
Mark Briggs worked as the new media director of The Herald in Everett, Wash. from 2000 to 2004 and as the assistant managing editor of The News Tribune in Tacoma from 2004 to 2008. While working at the two newspapers, Briggs also taught as an adjunct professor in communication at Seattle University from 2002 to 2006. Simultaneously, Briggs wrote “Journalism 2.0”, a book about digital literacy for journalists based on a training program he created at The News Tribune. More than 42,000 copies have been downloaded as a PDF and hundreds more were purchased as hard copies. In 2008, the book was translated into Spanish and Portuguese and another 60,000 people downloaded PDF versions in those languages. Since leaving The News Tribune, Briggs has spent time speaking, consulting and training. He has also assisted in the launch of a startup Web company in Seattle called Serra Media. This organization builds interactive applications and digital platforms for local publishers.
Return to top
Jason Robert Brown
2006
Jason Robert Brown has been hailed as “ one of Broadway's smartest and most sophisticated songwriters since Stephen Sondheim” (Philadelphia Inquirer), and his “extraordinary, jubilant theater music “ (Chicago Tribune) has been heard all over the world, whether in one of the hundreds of productions of his musicals every year or in his own incendiary live performances. The New York Times refers to Jason as “a leading member of a new generation of composers who embody high hopes for the American musical.” Jason is the composer and lyricist of the musical, “The Last Five Years,” which was cited as one of Time Magazine’s 10 Best of 2001 and won Drama Desk Awards for Best Music and Best Lyrics. Jason won a 1999 Tony Award for his score to "Parade", a musical written with Alfred Uhry and directed by Harold Prince, which premiered at Lincoln Center Theatre in December 1998, and subsequently won both the Drama Desk and New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards for Best New Musical. “Parade” was also presented on a national tour in 2000, which Jason conducted. Jason’s first musical, "Songs for a New World," a theatrical song cycle directed by Daisy Prince, played Off-Broadway at the WPA Theatre in the fall of 1995, and has since been seen in more than two hundred productions around the world. Jason’s newest musical, “13,” written with Dan Elish and directed by Todd Graff, premiered in January 2007 at Los Angeles’s Mark Taper Forum. Jason is the winner of the 2002 Kleban Award for Outstanding Lyrics and the 1996 Gilman & Gonzalez-Falla Foundation Award for Musical Theatre. Jason’s songs, including the cabaret standard “Stars and the Moon,” have been performed and recorded by Audra McDonald, Betty Buckley, Karen Akers, Renée Fleming, Philip Quast, Jon Hendricks and many others.
Return to top
Robert Brustein
2005 • 2006
As founding director of the Yale Repertory and American Repertory Theaters, Brustein has supervised more than 200 productions, acting in eight and directing 12, including his own adaptations of "The Father Ghosts," "The Changeling" and the trilogy of Pirandello works. He has written 11 adaptations for the A.R.T. and is the author of 13 books on theater, including the seminal classic, "The Theater of Revolt." His most recent book is "The Siege of the Arts." Brustein is the recipient of two George Jean Nathan Awards for dramatic criticism and of the George Polk Award in journalism. At present, in addition to serving as Creative Consultant to the A.R.T., he is also Professor of English at Harvard and drama critic for The New Republic.
Return to top
Ben Cameron
2005 • 2006 • 2007 • 2008
In 2006, Ben Cameron assumed his current position as Program Director, Arts at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation in New York, NY. In that capacity, he supervises a $17 million grants program focusing on organizations and artists in the theatre, contemporary dance, jazz and presenting fields. Previously, he served for more than 8 years as the Executive Director of Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the national service organization for the American nonprofit professional theater, significantly expanding its programs, membership base and grantmaking activities. Prior roles include his work as Senior Program Officer at the Dayton Hudson Foundation, Manager of Community Relations for Target Stores (supervising its grantmaking program) and four years at the National Endowment for the Arts, including two as Director of the Theater Program. A former theatre professional, frequent public speaker and arts activist, Mr. Cameron has served on numerous nonprofit boards and currently is a member of the national Grantmakers in the Arts board. He has received honorary degrees from DePaulUniversity in Chicago and American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, in addition to an MFA from the Yale School of Drama. In 2007, he was one of five recipients of the Distinguished Alumus Award from UNC. In addition to his not for profit work, he has lectured on theatre aboard the Queen Mary 2 as an Oxford Lecturer on three separate cruises, has spent 12 seasons as a panelist on the opera quiz feature on the Live from the Metropolitan broadcasts from New York, has twice ridden his bicycle from Minneapolis to Chicago to raise money for AIDS relief services, and served for three years as a member of the Tony Awards Nominating Committee.
Return to top
Sharon Carnicke
2006
Dr. Sharon Carnicke is the author of The Theatrical Instinct and Stanislavsky In Focus, as well as numerous articles on Stanislavsky and Russian theatre. She has translated several works and directed in New York, Los Angeles and Moscow. She received an American College Theatre Festival Award for her translation of The Seagull, a 2003 USC Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching, and a fellowship from the American Society for Theatre Research. She previously taught at New York University and the Moscow Art Theatre-Studio School. Dr. Carnicke is a Distinguished Fellow of the USC Center for Excellence in Teaching and teaches courses in Theatre History, Stage and Film Acting Theory, and Literature.
Return to top
Robert Christgau
2009
Robert Christgau began writing rock criticism for Esquire in 1967. He was a columnist at the Village Voice from 1969 to 1972, and returned to the Voice in 1974 after two years as the popular music critic at Newsday. Until 1985 he was music editor of the Voice, where he worked as a senior editor and chief music critic until 2006. His Consumer Guide column now appears monthly at msn.com and his cross-disciplinary Rock & Roll column at Barnes & Noble Review. He is a critic for NPR's All Things Considered. Christgau won a Guggenheim Fellowship to study the history of popular music in 1987 and in 2002 was a senior fellow at the National Arts Journalism Program, where he is vice chairman. He has published two essay collections: “Any Old Way You Choose” in 1973 and “Grown Up All Wrong” in 1998. Christgau has taught music history and writing at many colleges, including New York University and Princeton.
Return to top
Lap-Chi Chu
2008
Lap-Chi Chu is a member of the Lighting Design faculty at Cal Arts and a freelance lighting designer. He has worked in theatres across the country and is currently lighting The Importance of Being Ernest for South Coast Repertory. Lap’s work also includes architectural lighting projects as well as projection/computer graphics design. He is based in both Los Angeles and New York.
Return to top
Jen Cleary
2010
Jen Cleary, tech director, is an award-winning technician based in Philadelphia. She has designed shows at the Asian Arts Initiative (Philadelphia), Highways Performance Space (Santa Monica), OutNorth (Anchorage), Theatre Row (New York), Ruskin Theatre (Santa Monica), Pacific Resident Theatre (Venice, CA), La Pena Cultural Center (Berkeley, CA), the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), and the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). She is an Emmy Award winning broadcast engineer, having won for her work during September 11th at WPIX in New York. Her photography can be seen in California Heritage Museum's permanent collection.
Return to top
Kay Cole
2009 • 2010
Kay Cole, director and choreographer: Rose Bowl Queens, Desperate Writers, No Strings, Bark! The Flunky, The Dining Room, Nuncrackers, Judy’s Scary Little Christmas, A Year with Frog and Toad, A Chorus Line, Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Wild Women Blues, Mommy Mommy. Choreographer: Nightmare Alley, Great Expectations, Songs for a New World, Triumph of Love, Dancing at Lughnasa. Pasadena Playhouse: 110 in the Shade, Do I Hear A Waltz. Hollywood Bowl: Sound of Music, Bernsteins’ Mass, Mame, My Fair Lady, Music Man, Camelot. Reprise!: Three Penny Opera, Fiorello, City of Angels, Company, On The 20th Century, Follies, Sweeney Todd, Most Happy Fella. Other Los Angeles: Atlanta, Paint Your Wagon (Geffen); Grave White Way ( Hudson Theatre); Dogeaters, Gaytino (Kirk Douglas Theatre); Six Dance Lessons In Six Weeks ( Falcon,Geffen, Broadway); Snoopy, Blockheads (London – West End). Film / television: “Country Rules,” “THQ,” Disney’s “Santa Clause 3,” “The Daffies.”
Return to top
Tim Dang
2010
Tim Dang has been artistic director of East West Players since 1993 and has been affiliated with the organization since 1980 in various capacities from actor to director to producer. East West Players directing credits include Pippin, Sweeney Todd, Equus, Imelda, Passion, Monster, Pacific Overtures, A Language of Their Own, Porcelain, Queen of the Remote Control (co-director) and Into the Woods. Tim has also directed at Panasian Repertory Theatre (New York), Singapore Repertory Theatre, Asian American Theater Company (San Francisco), Mark Taper Forum New Works Festival, Celebration Theatre, West Coast Ensemble and Perseverance Theatre (Juneau, Alaska). As a writer, Tim wrote the book and lyrics for the musical Beijing Spring, the lyrics for Canton Jazz Club, and was co-writer on The Nisei Widows Club and The Nisei Widows Club Holiday on Thin Ice. Under his leadership, East West Players has grown from a 99-seat black box space to a professionally equipped 240-seat mid-sized theater. In 2006, Tim played an instrumental role on the national steering committee creating the NEXT BIG BANG: THE EXPLOSION OF ASIAN AMERICAN THEATRE, the first-ever national convening of 200 APA arts leaders and artists. Recently, Tim received a 2009 James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award. He is now planning the third national Asian American Theater Conference and Festival to take place in Los Angeles in June 2011.
Return to top
Gordon Davidson
2005 • 2006 • 2007 • 2009
Gordon Davidson is a director and producer and the founding artistic director of Center Theatre Group, the Mark Taper Forum and Ahmanson Theatre at the Music Center of Los Angeles, and the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City. For 38 years he guided hundreds of productions to the CTG stages. This work and his direction of many of the plays have been acclaimed both in Los Angeles and New York, garnering many awards including a Tony Award for the Taper in 1977 for theatrical excellence. Davidson, who was named by Variety as one of the top 100 entertainers of the century and who has been inducted in the Theater Hall of Fame, won a Tony Award for his direction of The Shadow Box and Tony nominations for his direction of Children of a Lesser God and The Trial of Catonsville Nine.
Return to top
Bart DeLorenzo
2006
Bart DeLorenzo is the Artistic Director of the Evidence Room in Los Angeles. Now in his 10th season, he has directed and/or produced 40 productions including world premieres by Kelly Stuart, Gordon Dahlquist, John Steppling, Peter J. Nieves, Ken Roht, and Michael Sargent, among others. He has participated in the development of new works at the Mark Taper Forum’s New Work Festival, A.S.K. Theater Projects, The Ojai Playwrights Conference, Madison Repertory, and the California Institute of the Arts. For his work, he has received three LA Weekly awards for Production and Direction and three BackStage Garland awards for Production, Adaptation and “Local Hero” Director.
Return to top
Debbie Devine
2009
Debbie Devine has been an award-winning theatre director and respected leader in the field of arts education for over three decades. She has been the chair of the drama department of The Colburn School of Performing Arts for over 20 years. She has been working with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for several years and is thrilled to be directing in the gorgeous space that is Disney Hall. Debbie is the cofounder of Los Angeles’ 24th Street Theatre, which has created award-winning professional theatre and model arts education programs for thousands of students and teachers since 1997. Debbie's work as an actor has earned her three Drama-Logue Critics Awards, a Robby Award, an LA Weekly Award, L.A. Parent Magazine Best Westside Children’s Theatre Award and the Women in Theatre Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Los Angeles Theatre. Debbie has earned the Los Angeles County Arts Commission’s professional designation in arts education. She is also the recipient of the USC Rossier School of Education Innovation and Leadership Award and won the Los Angeles County Music Center’s 2001 Bravo Special Mention for her work in arts education. Debbie was chosen by the U.S. Department of State to represent the United States as a cultural envoy in 2008.
Return to top
Ben Donenberg
2006 • 2007
Ben Donenberg is the Founder and Producing Artistic Director of Shakespeare Festival/LA, a 20-year-old, award-winning, community-based arts organization. Donenberg has performed as an actor on and off Broadway, on television, and in film. He has been a unit producer for feature films, and produced and directed more than 25 professional, theatrical productions. He annually stages a series of Shakespeare readings, hosted by Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks that features many of the world's finest actors and actresses. He has lectured on theater aesthetics for the University of Southern California, at the Huntington Library's teacher training seminars, and with Shakespeare Festival/LA's Will Power to Schools teacher trainings. He has taught Shakespeare performance at the California Institute for the Arts. Shakespeare Festival/LA's Will Power for Youth was recognized as an exemplary program for disadvantaged youth with the 2003 Coming Up Taller award from the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Donenberg has served as a theater grants panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and for the Los Angeles County Arts Commission. He is a member of the National Council on the Arts.
Return to top
Sylvie Drake
2006 • 2007
Sylvie Drake was born and grew up in Alexandria, Egypt. Emigrating to the U.S., she graduated from the Pasadena Playhouse, worked as an actor and director in Los Angeles and New York before turning to writing episodic television. In 1969 she became theatre critic for the Canyon Crier, a Los Angeles weekly, joining the theatre staff of The Los Angeles Timesas a critic and columnist in 1971 and becoming chief critic in 1991. In 1994, she joined the Denver Center as Director of Media Relations and Publications and an Associate Artist of the Denver Center Theatre Company where, a few years earlier, she had helped launch the DCTC's new play program, Prima Facie, later renamed U S WEST TheatreFest. She served on the 1994 Pulitzer Prize Drama Jury, was a personal interpreter for playwright Eugene Ionesco in the 1980s, served as president of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle and on the Executive Committee of the American Theatre Critics Association. Translations/adaptations include Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters, commissioned and staged by DCTC in the 1997/98 season; Paul Claudel's The Tidings Brought to Mary; Jean Anouilh's Traveler Without Luggage andThe Lark. In 1993, she wrote the principal text for a bilingual book about Quebec's Le Cirque du Soleil.
Return to top
Erik Ehn
2007
Erik Ehn, Dean of CalArts School of Theater since 2005, made his name as a playwright, dramatist and theorist of contemporary theater. His lyrical plays are composed of dense concentrated language and have been described as explosively imaginary. As a dramatist and educator, he argues for an artistic community based on hospitality and service. He is a co-founder of the RAT movement, an international network of alternative theaters committed to getting work before audiences despite limited economic resources. Before coming to CalArts, Ehn taught in a number of theater programs including those at the University of Iowa and Princeton University. He collaborated with CalArts faculty member Janie Geiser on Invisible Glass. This multimedia work employed puppets, live actors and film to explore the idea of the Doppelganger. His script for Invisible Glass was inspired by Edgar Allen Poe's short story William Wilson. It had its premiere at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) on April 28, 2005. Ehn is best known for The Saint Plays, an ongoing cycle of plays loosely based on the lives of the saints and biblical characters. His other plays include Heavenly Shades of Night are Falling, No Time Like the Present, Wolf at the Door, Tailings, Beginner, Ideas of Good and Evil and an adaptation of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. His dramas have been produced in San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, New York, San Diego and Chicago. In 2004, he was dramaturge on the critically acclaimed Peach Blossom Fan --- the inaugural production by CalArts Center for New Theater at REDCAT. His play, Maria Ktizito, was based on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and was the result of his research in that Central African country. Its premiere launched Atlanta's 7 Stages 2004-05 season. With Jean-Pierre Karegeye (co-founder and director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Group) Ehn currently conducts an annual arts/justice exchange with Rwanda, which features a trip to Africa in the summer (for mutual workshops, seminars, interviews) and a conference at CalArts in January (Arts in the One World, on the ways art and genocide relate). Ehn is co-founder and co-artistic director, alongside Lisa Bielawa, of the Tenderloin Opera Company in San Francisco and also an artistic associate of San Francisco's Theatre of Yugen. He was a recipient of the Alpert Award in the Arts in 2002 and the Whiting Writers Award in 1997.
Return to top
Geoff Elliott
2005 • 2006 • 2007 • 2008 • 2009 • 2010
Geoff Elliott has performed major roles for some of the leading regional theatres in America, including The American Conservatory Theatre, South Coast Repertory, Arizona Theatre Company, Milwaukee Repertory Theatre and California Shakespeare Festival. He has received three Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle awards, LA’s most prestigious theatre award, and more than a dozen other awards for acting. He has had leading roles in classic plays by such authors as O’Neill, Miller, Ibsen, Rostand, Wilde and Tennessee Williams. Mr. Elliott holds a bachelor's degree in fine arts from the University of Florida and a master's degree in fine arts from the American Conservatory Theatre.
Return to top
Julia Rodriguez-Elliott
2005 • 2006 • 2007 • 2008 • 2009 • 2010
Julia Rodriguez-Elliot has extensive experience teaching theatre arts to students from middle school to college and regularly conducts student workshops as part of A Noise Within’s educational programming. Ms. Rodriguez-Elliott has served on theatre panels for organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, and the LA Stage Alliance. In addition, she regularly conducts lectures for CalArts, the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and schools throughout the California State and University of California school systems to name a few. Ms. Rodriguez-Elliott holds a bachelor's degree of fine arts from the University of Florida and a master's degree in fine arts from the American Conservatory Theatre.
Return to top
Laura Emerick
2009
Laura Emerick is the arts editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, where she began her career after graduating from Indiana University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and environmental science (magna cum laude and phi beta kappa). At the Chicago Sun-Times, where she coordinates and oversees movie and classical music coverage, she also serves as the primary editor of film critic Roger Ebert. Among her interests are opera and Latin music; she also serves as the paper’s Latin music/culture writer. She was selected for the 2006 NEA Fellowship in classical music and opera, and the inaugural Museum of the Moving Image/New York Times Institute for film criticism in 2007. She also was one of the 2008 USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellows at the University of Southern California.
Return to top
Sheldon Epps
2008
Sheldon Eppsis artistic director of the renowned Pasadena Playhouse, conceived and directed the Duke Ellington musical Play On! which received three Tony Award nominations, and was produced at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, where it received four Jefferson Awards including Best Musical. The Pasadena Playhouse production was filmed by PBS for broadcast as part of the "Great Performances" series. For television he has directed episodes of "Frasier," "Friends," "The George Lopez Show," "Everybody Loves Raymond," and many others. Epps was pleased to join the Pasadena Playhouse as Artistic Director in 1997. His directing credits at the Playhouse include the record breaking production of Fences (starring Laurence Fishburne and Angela Bassett), As Bees In Honey Drown, Blue, Play On!, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, The Importance of Being Earnest, and the world premiere of the musical RAY CHARLES LIVE! among others. Under his leadership, the Pasadena Playhouse has once again become one of the premiere theatres in the country. Earlier this year, he received the James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award for his efforts and accomplishments during his decade long tenure at the Playhouse.
Return to top
Shirley Jo Finney
2007
Shirley Jo Finney is an award-winning director and actress and has directed all over the country including the Pasadena Playhouse, The Goodman Theatre, The Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Crosswords Theatre Company, Actors’ Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival, The Mark Taper Forum, The American College Theatre Festival and The Sundance Theatre Workshop. In the Fall of 2005 she premiered a new play based on a children’s book written by Whoopi Goldberg at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. that will tour nationally in 2007. She has received the Los Angeles Theatre Ovation Award nomination. The NAACP IMAGE AWARD, Drama Critics, Backstage West and the LA Weekly award for Best Director for her production of Yellow Man. Miss Finney is featured in INFINITI BLACK a national ad campaign for Infiniti. She also has to her directing credit three Drama-Logue Awards and Chicago’s Jefferson Award. She has directed several episodes of the UPN series (Moesha) and has received the International Black Filmmakers Award for the short film (Remember Me). Ms. Finney has directed for the Naked TV project for Fox Television. She is an alumnus for the American Film Institute’s Director Workshop for Women and holds an MFA degree from UCLA. Ms. Finney is also a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, The Director’s Guild, and the Screen Actor’s Guild. She has been Artist in Residence at Columbia College in Chicago, and a guest director and lecture at USC and UCLA.
Return to top
Matt Frank
2010
Matt Frank is a new media specialist for Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism (ASCJ). Matt spent eight years working in television and film as a cinematographer and editor before crossing into academia as a Multimedia Consultant for Penn State University. Matt joined ASCJ in December of 2009 and currently develops and teaches multimedia workshops for the Annenberg iLab.
Return to top
Mary Lou Fulton
2009
Mary Lou Fulton is vice president of audience development at The Bakersfield Californian, where she leads the company's new product development and market research teams. Fulton is the founder of The Northwest Voice, one of the first citizen journalism publications in the newspaper industry. The work of The Californian's new product development team has been widely recognized as a positive example of innovation in the newspaper business, particular in social media. Fulton's background spans both newspapers and technology. She started out in the newsroom, working for the AP and later as a reporter and editor for the Los Angeles Times. Fulton moved to the online world in 1995 when she joined The Washington Post's new media division and later became managing editor of washingtonpost.com. Fulton also held senior management positions at a number of online companies, including America Online, GeoCities and HomePage.com, before returning to the newspaper business in 2003 when she joined The Californian.
Return to top
Dana Gioia
2005 • 2007 • 2008
Dana Gioia is chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and an internationally acclaimed and award-winning poet. A native Californian of Italian and Mexican descent, Gioia (pronounced JOY-uh) received a B.A. and a M.B.A. from StanfordUniversity and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from HarvardUniversity. Gioia has published three full-length collections of poetry, as well as eight chapbooks. His poetry collection, Interrogations at Noon, won the 2002 American Book Award. An influential critic as well, Gioia’s 1991 book Can Poetry Matter?, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, is credited with reinvigorating the role of poetry in contemporary American culture and giving rise to popular poetry movements such as poetry slams and cowboy poetry. His poetry has been set to music by many composers in genres from classical to rock, including a full-length dance theater piece, Counting the Children. He has written two opera libretti, including Nosferatu (2001) released by Albany Records in 2005, with composer Alva Henderson, published by Graywolf Press. Also a prolific literary anthologist, his anthology, Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, co-edited with X.J. Kennedy, is the best-selling college literary textbook in America. He is also an active translator of poetry from Latin, Italian, German, and Romanian. He has published a translation of Italian Nobel Prize-winning poet Eugenio Montale's Mottetti (1990) as well as two large anthologies of Italian poetry. In 2001, Gioia founded "Teaching Poetry," a conference dedicated to improving high school teaching of poetry. Also, he is the founder and co-director of the West Chester University Poetry Conference, the nation's largest annual all-poetry writing conference. He has been awarded six honorary doctorates. Before moving to Washington, D.C., Dana Gioia lived in Sonoma County, California. He and his wife Mary have two sons.
Return to top
Jonathan Gold
2010
Jonathan Gold is the restaurant critic for LA Weekly and author of “Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles.” In 2007, he became the first food writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. This spring, he won the first Craig Claiborne Distinguished Restaurant Reviews award from the James Beard Foundation. In addition to writing about restaurants for Gourmet, Saveur, Food & Wine, and many other national magazines, Gold has a shady past as a composer and performance artist, spent time as the rap and heavy-metal correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, was music editor of the LA Weekly, and wrote about music and popular culture for Spin, Rolling Stone, Details and Vanity Fair. He contributes to the radio shows “Good Food” and “This American Life.”
Return to top
Thomas Griep
2009 • 2010
Thomas Griep has worked with some of the most talented singers in the business; including Carol Channing, Nathan Lane, Rita Moreno, Cher, Tommy Tune, David Hyde-Pierce, Bobby Vinton, Paul Anka, Olivia Newton-John and Franc D’ambrosio. Tom has conducted the Virginia Symphony orchestra, the Oklahoma Symphony and the Greensboro Symphony. He has been pianist for Lorna Luft (daughter of Judy Garland) with the Orlando Symphony. He is active as an orchestrator and composer. He recently finished doing the dance arrangements for the new Richard Sherman show called Pazzazz. Tom orchestrated the entire Broadway show for Franc D’ambrosio. Tom has worked in Los Angeles’ best theatres as conductor or assistant, including: Mamma Mia – Shubert Theatre, Ten Commandments ¬– Kodak Theatre, Will Rogers Follies – South Bay Civic Light, Big River – Mark Taper Forum, The Dead – Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Annie Get Your Gun – Orange County Performing Arts Center and Camelot – Hollywood Bowl. For more information check out Tom’s very popular web site for singers called AuditionTrax.com.
Return to top
Robert Hernandez
2010
Robert Hernandez worked for The Seattle Times from 2002 until 2009, where he was promoted from news producer to senior news producer to director of development. He helped shape and execute the vision for the Web site and company, leading a team of engineers and designers in research and development focusing on creating innovative tools and applications for both staff and readers, among many other duties. He was a Web designer and consultant for El Salvador's largest daily newspaper site, La Prensa Gráfica, Web producer for The San Francisco Chronicle and online editor of The San Francisco Examiner. He is also on the online board of directors for the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. He recently co-founded #wjchat, the weekly Twitter chat for Web journalists.
Return to top
Paul Hodgins
2010
Paul Hodgins has served as the theater critic for The Orange County Register since 1993. Beginning in 2008, Hodgins has covered dance for the Register as well. He also teaches in the College of Communications at California State University, Fullerton. Hodgins’ theater writing has appeared in Variety, American Theatre Magazine, The Sondheim Review and other publications, and his work is featured regularly on ArtsJournal. Hodgins was the San Diego Union-Tribune’s classical critic in 1991-92. Mr. Hodgins holds a doctoral degree in musical composition and theory from the University of Southern California, a M.Mus. from the University of Michigan, a B.Mus. from the University of British Columbia, and an Associate’s Diploma in piano performance from the Royal Conservatory of Music (Toronto). He also studied creative writing at Capilano College. Among his composition teachers were William Albright, William Bolcom and Morton Lauridsen. Hodgins’ compositions have been performed by the Kronos Quartet and the Sierra Wind Quintet, among other ensembles, and he has written incidental music for plays at UC Irvine and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. His book on performing arts aesthetics, “Music, Movement and Metaphor,” was published by the Edwin Mellen Press in 1992.
Return to top
Velina Hasu Houston
2005
Velina Hasu Houston, Ph.D., is Professor of Theatre, resident playwright, and creator and Director of the Master of Fine Arts in Dramatic Writing program at the University of Southern California School of Theatre. Across the span of her literary career, Houston has been recognized as a Japan Foundation Fellow, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow (twice), a Sidney F. Brody Fellow, and a James Zumberge Fellow (thrice); and been honored by Sidney Poitier. She was awarded a 2003 Silver Medal from the Pinter Review Prize for Drama. "Tea" and Houston’s other plays have been produced internationally to popular and critical acclaim including six world premieres over the last four years. Houston’s other plays include "Kokoro (True Heart)," "Necessities," the PEN-honored "Ikebana"; the Kennedy Center-honored "Asa Ga Kimashita (Morning Has Broken)" and "Matsuyama Mirror" (featured at Singapore Youth Festival), and others. Her newest works include "Calling Aphrodite," "The Ideal and The Life," and "The Peculiar and Sudden Nearness of the Moon." Twelve plays have been commissioned by: Manhattan Theatre Club, Asia Society, Honolulu Theatre for Youth and the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Foundation New Generations Play Project; The Mark Taper Forum (two), The Jewish Women's Theatre Project, Sacramento Theatre Company (three), and others. Her plays have been produced by Manhattan Theatre Club, Pasadena Playhouse, Old Globe Theatre, Sacramento Theatre Company, Syracuse Stage, Barrington Stage Company, TheatreWorks, George Street Playhouse, Pittsburgh Public Theatre, Smithsonian Institution, Whole Theatre (Olympia Dukakis, producer), Japan Society (New York), L.A. Theatre Works, NHK (Japan, nationwide), Negro Ensemble Company, and others. Her critical essays and poetry are published in journals and anthologies. Professional memberships include Writers Guild of America, west; Dramatists Guild, and Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights. Her works are archived in The Velina Hasu Houston Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. "Tea," opens at International City Theatre, Long Beach, California, in April, 2005.
Return to top
Barbara Isenberg
2005 • 2007 • 2009 • 2010
Barbara Isenberg is the author of “Conversations with Frank Gehry,” which reflects her interviews with the celebrated architect over the past 20 years. Formerly a staff reporter for both the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, she has also written for Time, Esquire, and London's Sunday Times. Founder and host of the Getty Center’s Art Matters public interviews, she received a Distinguished Artist Award from the Los Angeles Music Center, has been a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute and is currently associate director of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at USC. Her earlier books include “Making It Big: The Diary of a Broadway Musical” and “State of the Arts: California Artists Talk About Their Work.”
Return to top
Jean-Claude van Itallie
2005
Jean-Claude van Itallie is an undisputed legend of the modern American theatre. His trilogy of one-act plays, America Hurrah, was hailed as the watershed Off-Broadway play of the ’60s. He was one of Ellen Stewart's original lamama playwrights, and principal playwright of Joseph Chaikin's Open Theatre, for which van Itallie wrote The Serpent. His plays also include The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Bag Lady, The Traveler (premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in 1987), and Struck Dumb, with/for Joseph Chaikin, (premiered at the Taper Too in 1989). His translations include Genet’s The Balcony and the four major plays of Anton Chekhov. His newest play, Light, about Voltaire and the Age of Enlightenment, had its world premiere this past fall at The Theatre @ Boston Court in Pasadena, California. Author of The Playwright's Workbook, van Itallie has taught playwriting at Princeton, NYU, Harvard, Yale School of Drama, Amherst, Columbia, University of Colorado, Naropa University and other colleges. Since 1995 he has led workshops around the country on "Healing Power of Theatre" and "Writing on Your Feet." He is founder and artistic director of Shantigar Foundation for theatre, meditation and healing, located on a farm in Western Massachusetts where van Itallie lives.
Return to top
Tom Jacobson
2010
Tom Jacobson, Ensemble Studio Theatre-LA artistic director, is a playwright who has had more than 50 productions in Los Angeles and around the country, including Sperm at Circle X Theatre Company, The Orange Grove at Playwrights Arena, and the award-winning Bunbury, Tainted Blood and Ouroboros at The Road Theatre Company (Bunbury, Tainted Blood, Ouroboros have just been published by Broadway Play Publishing). He has been a co-literary manager of The Theatre @ Boston Court, a founding member of Playwrights Ink, and a board member of Cornerstone Theater Company. He teaches playwriting and related courses for UCLA Extension. His most recent production was The Friendly Hour at The Road (nominated for four LA Weekly Awards). Upcoming productions include the world premiere of The Chinese Massacre (Annotated) at Circle X.
Return to top
Hirokazu Kosaka
2010
Hirokazu Kosaka was born in Japan. He is an ordained Shingon Buddhist priest, a master of the art of Japanese archery, as well as the Artistic Director of the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center. After graduating from the Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles in 1970, he continued to study in the fields of Esoteric Buddhist art. He has been actively advocating Japanese culture and art at JACCC since 1984.
Return to top
Jessica Kubzansky
2006 • 2007
Jessica Kubansky (Director, Co-Artistic Director, The Theatre @ Boston Court) is an award-winning director working around the country at: South Coast Rep, Geffen Playhouse, Portland Center Stage, Mark Taper New Works, The Aurora, Boston Publick, etc. Recent world premieres: Leitmotif(SCR/PPF), Van Itallie's Light and Cody Henderson's Cold/Tender(T@BC), Carlos Murillo’s Unfinished American Highwayscape #9 & 32 (T@BC), Julia Cho's BFE(PCS/JAW/West), Tom Jacobson's The Orange Grove(Playwrights' Arena), Bryan Davidson's War Music(Geffen/Playwrights’ Arena/Echo), Sheila Callaghan's Kate Crackernuts(24th St.), Salamone/McIntyre's Moscow (Chekhov Now, NYC); plus, Hare/Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children (T@BC), Two Gentlemen of Verona(Illinois Shakes), The Glass Menagerie, Toys in the Attic(Colony), Measure for Measure(A Noise Within), etc. She received the LADCC award for Sustained Excellence in Theatre.
Return to top
John Lahr
2007
John Lahr has been the senior drama critic for The New Yorker since October, 1992. A veteran of all aspects of the theatre, Lahr has expanded the magazine’s drama coverage to include behind-the-scenes portraits, reviews, profiles, and coverage not only of Broadway but also of international theatre and regional companies. Lahr is the son of the comedian Bert Lahr, whom he wrote about in his best-selling biography Notes on a Cowardly Lion. A former theatre critic at The Nation, The Village Voice, and British Vogue, among other publications, Lahr has published seventeen books on the theatre and two novels. His book Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization won the 1992 Roger Machell Prize for the best book on the performing arts. Other works include Light Fantastic: Adventures in Theatre (1996) and Show and Tell: New Yorker Profiles (2000). In 2001, he edited The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan. His expanded New Yorker article on Frank Sinatra was made into a book with photographs, Frank Sinatra: The Artist and the Man. Lahr’s most recent book is Honky Tonk Parade: New Yorker Profiles of Show People, published in 2005. Lahr served as literary advisor to the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis in 1968, and as advisor to the Vivian Beaumont Theatre from 1969 to 1971. He was co-producer of the 1987 film Prick Up Your Ears based on his Joe Orton biography of the same name. Lahr has also written numerous movie scripts. His short film Sticky My Fingers, Fleet My Feet (directed by John Hancock) was nominated for an Academy Award in 1971. Lahr is a two-time winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. Lahr has written many stage adaptations, which have been performed in England and the United States, including: Accidental Death of an Anarchist, The Manchurian Candidate, The Bluebird of Unhappiness: A Woody Allen Revue, and Diary of a Somebody, which began at the Royal National Theatre, played the West End, and later toured England. He co-created, with Elaine Stritch, the Tony Award-winning Elaine Stritch at Liberty, for which they also won the 2002 Drama Desk Award for outstanding book to a musical. Lahr is the first drama critic ever to win a Tony Award. Lahr received his B.A. from Yale University and his Master¹s degree from Worcester College, Oxford University. He divides his time between New York and London and maintains a Web site at www.johnlahr.com.
Return to top
Thomas Leabhart
2005 • 2006 • 2007 • 2008
Thomas Leabhart, Resident Artist and Professor of Theatre at Pomona College for 25 years, edits Mime Journal and wrote Modern and Post-Modern Mime (Macmillan) and Etienne Decroux (Routledge). Leabhart studied with Etienne Decroux from1968 to 1972 and his work has been recognized with grants from Fulbright, NEA, the California Arts Council, the Ohio Arts Council, International Research and Exchanges Board, The Canada Council, and the French Ministry of Culture, among others. Leabhart is a permanent member of the Artistic Staff of ISTA (International School of Theatre Anthropology), directed by Eugenio Barba. He teaches regularly in Paris, Lyon and Aurillac, and at other times in South America and Asia.
Return to top
Allison Leach
2008
Allison Leach has designed costumes for CTG's US premiere of Pyranees and P.L.A.Y. production Very Old with Enormous Wings. She costumed the Actor's Gang's current touring production of 1984, directed by Tim Robbins. Other collaborations include "The Wasps" at the Getty Villa and "Merchant of Venice" for LAWSC (Ovation Award). Allison is currently the Assistant Costume Designer for AMC series "Mad Men."
Return to top
Judith Lewis
2005
Judith Lewis began her career as a theater critic at City Pages in Minneapolis in 1988, where she later became arts editor; in 1991 she came to Los Angeles to work at the LA Weekly, where over the last 13 years she has been an editor and writer covering the arts, books, technology and the environment. She has also written for American Theatre, Elle, Newsday, Salon and Wired, and teaches journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication.
Return to top
Sandra Tsing Loh
2006
Sandra Tsing Loh is an Los Angeles-based writer/performer/musician. Her books, all published by Riverhead Books, include a novel, If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home By Now, which the Los Angeles Times named one of the best books of 1997, Depth Takes A Holiday: Essays From Lesser Los Angeles, and Aliens In America. The latter is based on Loh's solo Off Broadway show which ran at Second Stage Theatre in New York in summer, 1996. She will return to Second Stage for Bad Sex With Bud Kemp, her next solo show, to premiere in April, 1998. Loh has also been featured at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, the HBO New Writers Project, and on NPR's "This American Life." She is also a regular commentator on NPR's "Morning Edition," a show which coincidentally has used segments from Pianovision as buttons. Currently, Loh is most musically active as a composer for film. She composed and performed on the score for Jessica Yu's 1997 Oscar-winning documentary Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien, and is scoring Ms. Yu's next documentary on HBO of the Living Museum. Sandra also has appeared on tour performing her darkly comic semi-autobiographical tale of growing up middle class Chinese-German in Southern California - "Aliens in America." Loh began in the mid'80s as a performance artist; her piano concert "spectacles" were covered by such outlets as People, the Wall Street Journal, GQ, Glamour, the Associated Press, CNN, and even in Johnny Carson's Tonight Show monologue. Nearly 1,000 people attended "Night of the Grunion" (March 1989), in which Loh and the Topanga Symphony played a concerto for spawning fish on a Malibu beach at midnight. In "Self Promotion" (March 1988), an assistant flung $1,000 in autographed $1 bills over her as she performed before a stampeding crowd. "Spontaneous Demographics" (September 1987) featured Loh playing a piano aboard a flatbed truck in a concert for rush hour commuters on the Harbor Freeway.
Return to top
Jay McAdams
2009
Jay McAdams is a cofounder of 24th Street Theatre and has been its executive director since 1999. He has produced many successful shows and events since his beginning in Los Angeles theatre over 20 years ago. Though most of Jay’s theatre work now is behind the scenes, he began in theatre as an actor, having graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. His work in television has included recurring work on NBC’s daytime drama, “Days of Our Lives”, where he played the conniving attorney, Jody McKay. Jay is also a master teacher. He has created acclaimed arts education programs for tens of thousands of children. Jay is the winner of the University of Southern California’s School of Education’s Innovation and Leadership Award for his work in arts education. Jay is a graduate of the Los Angeles County Arts Commission Arts Leadership Initiative, and is one of only 300 arts leaders worldwide to be awarded a National Arts Strategy fellowship to the prestigious Stanford University executive program for nonprofit leaders. Jay has also been selected by the U.S. State Department to serve as a cultural envoy to El Salvador.
Return to top
Evelyn McDonnell
2010
Evelyn McDonnell is a widely published culture critic and author and editor of several books, including “Mamarama: A Memoir of Sex, Kids and Rock ‘n’ Roll” and “Rent by Jonathan Larson.” She coedited the anthologies “Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop and Rap” and “Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky: Music and Myth.” She has been the editorial director of www.MOLI.com, pop culture writer at The Miami Herald, senior editor at The Village Voice, and associate editor at SF Weekly. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Spin, Travel & Leisure, Interview, and the Los Angeles Times. She codirected the conference “Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky: Music and Myth” at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York in 1998. She has won several fellowships and awards, including the Annenberg Fellowship at the University of Southern California, where she completed her Master’s of Arts in Specialized Journalism in May 2010. She is currently assistant professor of English in new media and journalism at Loyola Marymount University.
Return to top
Terence McFarland
2008 • 2010 • 2011
Terence McFarland has been Executive Director of LA Stage Alliance, greater Los Angeles’ largest performing arts service organization, since 2003. McFarland has served as the lead consultant on the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles Arts retention projects in Hollywood, North Hollywood and MidCity and as a grants panelist for numerous cultural and arts commissions. McFarland is a graduate of Southern California Leadership Network’s Leadership LA 2008 program and was chosen by his peers to serve as the graduation speaker. He completed the Los Angeles County Arts Commission Arts Leadership Initiative Executive Learning Group in 2005 and has earned certificates from American’s for the Arts / Arts Marketing Project’s Advanced Training Program and The Kennedy Center’s Leadership Exchange in Arts and Disability (LEAD) and was a member of Deloitte’s inaugural Center for Leadership & Community. He currently serves on the boards of Arts for LA, California Arts Advocates and serves as President of California Institute of the Arts Alumni Association. He holds both an MFA and a BFA from California Institute of the Arts, an Associates Degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology and certificates from Polimoda in Florence, Italy and the Executive Program for Nonprofit Leaders –Arts from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. He is a Trustee of LA City Councilmember Jose Huizar’s Bringing Back Broadway Initiative. He spent over a decade working in the New York fashion industry including positions with Ralph Lauren, Geoffrey Beene, Calvin Klein, Gucci, Bergdorf Goodman, Interview and Details magazines among others. McFarland is a resident of Lincoln Heights in Los Angeles with his domestic partner, Dennis Smeal, a lawyer and playwright and his stepdaughter, Kate Smeal a junior at Berklee College of Music.
Return to top
Douglas McLennan
2007 • 2008 • 2009 • 2010 • 2011
Douglas McLennan is the founder and editor of ArtsJournal.com, the leading aggregator of arts journalism on the Internet. Prior to starting ArtsJournal, McLennan was arts columnist and music critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. A former concert pianist, he has a master's degree in music from the Juilliard School in New York. He has written on the arts for numerous publications, including as music critic for Salon.com, and for Newsweek, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the London Evening Standard. McLennan has been a music critic for National Public Radio's “All Things Considered.” He was head of the board of the National Arts Journalism Program (NAJP) at Columbia University until last summer. He is a recipient of several awards for arts criticism and reporting, including a NAJP fellowship at Columbia University and a Deems Taylor/ASCAP Award for music journalism.
Return to top
Charles McNulty
2007 • 2008
Charles McNulty is the chief theater critic of The Los Angeles Times. Before that he was the theater editor of The Village Voice and served as a critic for that publication from 1992 to 2005. He was also a member of the Obie Award panel from 1995-2005, serving as chairman from 2003-2005. A graduate of the dramaturgy and theater criticism program of the Yale School of Drama, McNulty is a former literary manager of the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, who also led the graduate program in dramaturgy and theater criticism at BrooklynCollege. He currently teaches in UCLA’s Graduate Theater program. In addition, he has taught at the NewSchool, NYU, Yale, and the CUNYGraduateCenter. He serves on the advisory board of Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas as well as the editorial board of the Best Plays Theatre Yearbook.
Return to top
Victor Merina
2006
Victor Merina is a Senior Fellow at the USC Annenberg institute for Justice and Journalism and program coordinator for the M.A. program in specialized journalism. A former Los Angeles Times reporter, he covered local government and politics, transportation, law enforcement, and urban affairs, among other issues. As an investigative reporter, he was a member of the paper's projects team and was part of the group of reporters named as finalists for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for a week-long series on homicides in Los Angeles County. He also shared in the paper’s 1993 Pulitzer for spot news coverage of the L.A. Riots and has contributed essays to the Los Angeles Times Sunday Opinion and Magazine sections. Merina currently is an editor for reznetnews.com, a Web site featuring stories about Native American issues, and has taught at the American Indian Journalism Institute in South Dakota and organized a “Covering Indian Country” seminar for the Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism. A former fellow at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, Merina has conducted newsroom training for the Committee of Concerned Journalists, the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism in South Africa and the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute in Nashville. He was a two-year teaching fellow at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and a Media Studies Center fellow in New York City. Merina has a B.A. in political science from UCLA and an M.S. degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Read more »
Return to top
Michael Michetti
2006 • 2007
Michael Michetti (Director, Co-Artistic Director of The Theatre @ Boston Court) A Picture of Dorian Gray; Pera Palas (LADCC Winner: Best Play, Director); Summertime; Romeo and Juliet: Antebellum New Orleans, 1836. Elsewhere: As You Like It (A Noise Within); Ouroboros, by Tom Jacobson (Road Theatre - L.A. Weekly Award: Production of the Year); Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle (Matrix Theatre); David Hare’s Amy’s View starring Carol Lawrence (Florida Rep); Mamet's A Life in the Theatre starring Hal Holbrook (Pasadena Playhouse); Brecht's Edward IIand Aphra Behn's The Rover (Circle X); Titanic (CLO of South Bay Cities); Sweeney Todd starring Amanda McBroom and George Ball; A Midsummer Night's Dream (Ovation Awards: Best Play, Director).
Return to top
Tim Miller
2010
Tim Miller is an internationally acclaimed performance artist. Miller's creative work as a performer and writer explores the artistic, spiritual and political topography of his identity as a gay man. Hailed for his humor and passion, Miller has tackled this challenge in such pieces as Postwar (1982), Cost of Living (1983), Democracy in America (1984), Buddy Systems (1985), Some Golden States (1987), Stretch Marks (1989), Sex/Love/Stories (1991), My Queer Body (1992), Naked Breath (1994), Fruit Cocktail (1996), Shirts & Skin (1997) Glory Box (1999), US (2003) and 1001 Beds (2006). Miller's performances have been presented all over North America, Australia, and Europe in such prestigious venues as Yale Repertory Theatre, the Institute of Contemporary Art (London), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He is the author of the books Shirts & Skin, Body Blows and 1001 Beds, which won the 2007 Lambda Literary Award for best book in Drama-Theatre. His solo theater works have been published in the play collections O Solo Homo and Sharing the Delirium. Miller’s newest book 1001 Beds, an anthology of his performances, essays and journals, was published by University of Wisconsin Press in 2006. Miller has taught performance at UCLA, NYU, the School of Theology at Claremont and at universities all over the US. He is a co-founder of two of the most influential performance spaces in the United States: Performance Space 122 on Manhattan's Lower East Side and Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, CA.
Return to top
Steven Leigh Morris
2005 • 2006 • 2007 • 2008 • 2009 • 2010 • 2011
Steven Leigh Morris currently serves as Critic-At-Large for LA Weekly, where he also contributes features on topics ranging from barnyard poultry to Russian politics. His theater articles have been published in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and American Theatre Magazine. Morris has also been playwright-in-residence at Moscow’s Theater on Spartacus Square and the Actors’ Gang in Los Angeles.
Return to top
Mark Murphy
2007
Mark Murphy is the executive director of REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater), an interdisciplinary arts center, theater and gallery opened by the California Institute of the Arts in November, 2003. Located in the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall, REDCAT is Los Angeles’ new home for contemporary art, performance, film and media, featuring artists from around the world as well as Southern California. Murphy is an influential figure in the national and international field of contemporary performing arts, with over 20 years of experience producing, presenting and developing new audiences for interdisciplinary performances. Murphy has served as Chairman of the Choreographer's Fellowship Panel for the National Endowment for the Arts, was a founding board member of the National Performance Network, an advisor to the National Dance Project, and a member of the Advisory Board for the Japan Foundation's Performing Arts Program. While serving as the Artistic Director of On the Boards, a contemporary performing arts center in Seattle (1984-2001), Murphy commissioned or co-produced adventurous new productions from some of the world's most influential contemporary performing artists, and developed a unique model for combining the disparate acts of producing and presenting - helping emerging and established artists to create and tour new work, and also serving as a leading host of major international and national productions. Murphy has also been active as a writer, performer and director, having performed his original solo and group projects at multiple venues throughout the U.S., and developed three projects for PBS affiliate KCTS TV. He is the winner of first place awards from the Society of Professional Journalists for Feature Writing and radio documentary production. He is a graduate of Fairhaven College.
Return to top
Joe Nickell
2008
Joe Nickell covers the arts and entertainment beat at the Missoulian newspaper in Missoula, MT, and is editor of the paper's "Entertainer" weekly tab. He is the sole contributor at Nickellbag.com, a blog focused on Missoula arts and entertainment; and he co-writes Flyover (http://artsjournal.com/flyover), a team blog about art in the great American outback. His writing has been featured in the New York Times, Newsday, Inside Arts, Business 2.0, Salon.com, Outside, Wired, and numerous other publications; and he was the 2006 winner of the Society of Professional Journalists' Excellence in Journalism award for arts and arts criticism in the Pacific northwest. He also co-produces Rox (http://rox.com), the first television series broadcast on the Internet (according to Time Magazine) and “the best TV show in America” (Wired Magazine).
Return to top
Bill O’Brien
2007 • 2008
Bill O'Brien was appointed as the NEA's Director of Theater and Musical Theater in July 2006. O'Brien designs and directs national leadership initiatives, such as recently announced New Play Development Project. He develops partnerships to advance the theater field, recommends panelists, and manages the review process for theater and musical theater applications. Prior to his appointment, he served for seven years as producing director and managing director for Deaf West Theater (DWT) where he received a Tony and a Drama Desk nomination for producing the Broadway sign language production of Big River and received three Ovation Award nominations for his work on the production of Big River at Deaf West (as producer, sound designer and lead actor). That production went on to win three Best Musical awards (Ovation, LADCC and Backstage Garland) and the cast of Big River was awarded the 2004 Tony Honor for Excellence in the Theater. Other productions he produced for Deaf West include A Streetcar Named Desire (Ovation Award -- Best Play) and Oliver! (Ovation Award -- Best Musical). He has appeared in Deaf West productions of True West (Austin) and BigRiver (Backstage West Garland Award for Lead Actor, Helen Hayes Nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor). He has appeared on numerous television programs as well, including as an ensemble member on all seven seasons of NBC's multi-Emmy Award winning "The West Wing". His advocacy efforts on behalf of the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act of the U.S. Department of Education helped garner Deaf West Theatre the Secretary of Health and Human Services Highest Recognition Award for "bridging the gap between the deaf and hearing worlds through theatre." In addition, O'Brien has served as executive vice president on the executive board of the National Alliance for Music Theatre and as a task force member, conference speaker, and grant panelist with Theatre Communications Group, both national service organization for the theater and musical theater fields.
Return to top
Laurie Ochoa
2010 • 2011
Laurie Ochoa is co-founder of Slake, a quarterly journal that debuts this summer with narrative journalism, essays, photography, art, poetry and fiction about Los Angeles. Until last summer, she was editor-in-chief of the LA Weekly, which won more national journalism awards during her eight-year tenure than any other alternative newspaper in the U.S. She spent ten years as a reporter and editor at the Los Angeles Times, including five as the paper's food editor, and was the executive editor of Gourmet magazine. She is also the author of “Nancy Silverton's Breads From the La Brea Bakery.”
Return to top
Tim Page
2009
Tim Page is a visiting professor in both the Annenberg School of Journalism and the Thornton School of Music at USC. Page won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1997 for his writings about music in The Washington Post, where he has held the position of chief classical music critic from 1995 to 2008. Prior to the Post, he served as the chief music critic for Newsday and as a music and cultural writer for The New York Times. In New York, he was the host of an afternoon program on WNYC-FM that broadcast interviews with hundreds of composers and musicians, including Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Dizzy Gillespie, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk and Steve Reich. An interview with Glenn Gould, comparing the pianist's two versions of Bach's “Goldberg Variations,” was released as part of a three-CD set entitled “A State of Wonder” in 2002. In 1993, Page served as the first executive producer for BMG Catalyst, a short-lived record label devoted to new and unusual music. Page has also produced concerts at venues ranging from Carnegie Hall to New York's once-infamous Mudd Club. From 1999 to 2001, he was the artistic advisor and creative chair for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. He has published several books and, born with Asperger's Syndrome, is currently writing a memoir of his experience with the condition for Doubleday, to be published in 2009.
Return to top
Aaron Paley
2010 • 2011
Aaron Paley is the President and co-founder of Community Arts Resources (CARS), Los Angeles' leading community and cultural festival producer, as well as the founder and board chair of Yiddishkayt - the largest organization devoted to Yiddish culture west of the Hudson and the producer of the biggest Yiddish festival in the nation. A Los Angeles native, Paley has 25 years of experience in production, administration and planning for the arts. Since he created CARS in 1989 with Katie Bergin, the company has cultivated such clients as the Getty Center in Brentwood, the Getty Villa in Malibu, the City of Santa Monica, and the Related Company. CARS festivals have attracted nearly a million attendees and continue to set the highest standards for community participation, interactivity, and programming quality. Paley is a recipient of the 2008 Stanton Fellowship from the Durfee Foundation and is focusing on the issue of public space and its utilization in Los Angeles.
Return to top
Dominic Papatola
2006 • 2007 • 2008 • 2009 • 2010 • 2011
Dominic Papatola has been the lead theater critic of the Saint Paul Pioneer Press since May 1999. He is a lifelong Minnesotan who earned his journalism degree from the University of Minnesota in 1987. Dominic began his career in criticism with the now-defunct alternative news weekly, the Twin Cities Reader. He covered everything from ballet to tractor pulls as the arts and entertainment writer at the Duluth News-Tribune, followed by a stint as the theater critic for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Dominic is a two-time juror for Pulitzer Prize in Drama, and chaired the jury in 2009. He has headed the Center for Arts Criticism and the American Theatre Critics Association, and his commentaries have been heard on Minnesota Public Radio, National Public Radio and Minnesota Public Television. He lives with his eternally patient wife and two smart-mouthed children in Minneapolis.
Return to top
Yael Pardess
2008
Yael Pardess' designs have been seen in theatres from Broadway to Los Angeles and many points in between. Her work has been represented at the Mark Taper Forum, Kirk Douglas, Pasadena Playhouse, The Geffen Playhouse, The Guthrie, A.C.T., Oregon Shakespeare Festival, A.R.T., London’s West End and on Broadway. To name a few: Blade to the Heat, Diva, Scenes From an Execution, Richard the II, Stand Up Tragedy, Macbeth, Don Giovanni, The Cherry Orchard, Death and the Maiden and George Gershwin Alone. Her work has received many awards and nominations including The Drama Circle Critic's Award for Blade to the Heat. She has proudly worked with directors David Lee, Ron Link, Joel Zwick, Tom Moore, Asaad Kelada, Robert Egan, Seret Scott, Jo Bonney, Peggy Shannon, Debra Levine, Jessica Kubzanski, Ken Albers, and Brendon Fox on many award winning productions. Yael also designs for Film, Commercials and Immersive Multi Media Theatrical Productions in Theme Parks and Museums. Among them are: BobBullockHistoryMuseum in Austin TX and The New Lincoln Library in SpringfieldIllinois (both Theo award winners) and a collaboration with Steven Spielberg for Universal Studios Japan. She taught Theatre Design at the University of Southern California. She is currently a Senior Visual Director for Disney Creative Entertainment.
Return to top
Carey Perloff
2008
Carey Perloff recentlycelebrated her 15th season as artistic director of A.C.T., where she has brought the theater to unprecedented success by rebuilding the earthquake-damaged Geary Theater (winning the Jujamcyn Award in 1996 when the Geary re-opened), directing dozens of highly acclaimed productions that have toured the country, revitalizing A.C.T.’s world famous MFA program in Acting, launching international collaborations with such artists at Robert Wilson and Tom Stoppard, creating a Core Company of actors, and inaugurating a major New Works program. During Perloff’s tenure, A.C.T. has consistently operated in the black, erased its accumulated deficit, and grown its budget from $12 million to $20 million, allowing the organization to make significant investments in developing artists, producing ambitious classics, commissioning new work, and creating educational programs to grow its audience. Over the past two seasons, Perloff has helped to spearhead the company’s first-ever Endowment Campaign, which currently totals $23 million. For the 40th Anniversary season of A.C.T. and her fifteenth. Perloff directed the sold-out World Premiere production of Philip Kan Gotanda’s epic story AFTER THE WAR (commissioned and developed by A.C.T. and workshopped at the Sundance Playwrights Lab), an acclaimed revival of Stoppard’s TRAVESTIES, and the first workshop of a new movement theater piece TOSCA in collaboration with dancers from San Francisco Ballet. Before joining A.C.T., Perloff was artistic director of Classic Stage Company in New York. Perloff received a B.A. in Classics and Comparative literature Phi Beta Kappa, Summa cum laude from StanfordUniversity and was a Fulbright Fellow at St. Anne’s College, OxfordUniversity. She directs in the A.C.T. Master of Fine Arts Program and is the proud mother of Lexie and Nicholas.
Return to top
Michael Phillips
2006 • 2007 • 2008 • 2009 • 2011
Michael Phillips is the film critic of the Chicago Tribune. For 25 years he covered many of America's leading theatrical centers, serving as drama critic for the Dallas Times-Herald, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. At 22, he was hired as a film critic for City Pages, later became its arts editor and, in the Twin Cities, reviewed film for Minnesota Public Radio and KFAI-FM. Phillips has served as chair of the Pulitzer Prize drama jury and three times served as a Pulitzer juror. He teaches criticism at the O'Neill Theater Center National Critics Institute, recently conducted a regional critics workshop for the American College Theater Festival and returns each fall to the University of Chicago to teach a course in cinema history.
Return to top
Ann Powers
2009 • 2010
Ann Powers, chief pop-music critic for the Los Angeles Times, is the author of “Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America” and coeditor of “Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop, and Rap.” She was an editor for the Village Voice from 1993-1996, and pop critic for The New York Times from 1997-2001. She is a former senior curator at the Experience Music Project in Seattle. In 2005, Powers co-wrote the book “Piece by Piece” with musician Tori Amos.
Return to top
Travis Preston
2006
Travis Preston is the Director of Performance at CalArts School of Theater and the Artistic Director for CalArtsCenter for New Theater. His upcoming projects include The Long Road to Freedom, a collaboration with Harry Belafonte to be presented at Carnegie Hall. Most recently he directed the Center for New Theater production of Macbeth, a Modern Ecstasy in which Stephen Dillane performed the entire text of Shakespeare's tragedy at REDCAT (the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater). In 2002, he conceived and directed the award-winning CNT production of King Lear, both in its world premiere at the Brewery in Los Angeles in 2002 and for its subsequent production in France at the 2003 Frictions Festival produced by La Théâtre National Dijon Bourgogne. In Europe, Preston directed Boris Godounov and a highly controversial production of Luigi Nono's Al Gran Sole Carico D'Amore both at the Hamburg State Opera. His theater work in the US includes the world premieres of Democracy in America and Terra Nova at Yale Rep and the American premieres of Koltes' Roberto Zucco and Buero Vallejo's Sleep of Reason. In 1998, Mr. Preston collaborated with CalArts students on the creation of An Unseen Energy Swallows Space, which was subsequently presented at The Kitchen in NY. He has taught at Yale, Columbia University, New York University, Indiana University, Harvard University, and in Hong Kong and Denmark. Mr. Preston holds an MFA in Theater from Yale.
Return to top
Leonard C. Pronko
2006
Leonard C. Pronko is Professor of Theatre at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Since 1965 he has directed some twenty Kabuki productions in English at the College and elsewhere. In 1970 he was the first non-Japanese to study at the Kabuki Training Program at the National Theatre of Japan. He has studied Kabuki dance with a number of eminent dance teachers both in the U.S. and in Japan. In 1972 Pronko received a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for his Kabuki productions, and in 1973 took his actors to perform at the Kennedy Center in Washington as part of the American College Theatre Festival. In 1986 Pronko received the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Third Degree, from the government of Japan in recognition of his achievements in introducing Kabuki to the West. In 1997 he received the ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) Award for Outstanding Teacher of Theatre in Higher Education. Pronko has written a number of books on western and eastern theatre, including The World of Jean Anouilh, Avant-garde, Theatre East and West and Guide to Japanese Drama. He has translated the plays of Alfonso Sastre, and published monographs on a number of French playwrights. For twenty-seven years Pronko was Professor of Romance Languages at Pomona College and taught French language and literature and occasionally Spanish and Italian language. He continues to direct plays, including many western classics from Marlowe and Racine to Ibsen and Perandello.
Return to top
Madeline Puzo
2006
Madeline Puzo, a veteran of some of the country’s leading regional theaters, was appointed dean of the USC School of Theatre in July 2002. Her experience ranges from producing new play festivals to classical productions in rotating repertory to musical theatre. Puzo came to USC from the Ahmanson Theatre, Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles. As associate producer there, she had planned seasons and supervised productions since 1995. Prior to 1995, she was producing director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, heading both the artistic and production staffs and establishing a research and commissioning program to discover and produce plays from non-Western cultures. From 1981 to 1989, she was associate producer for the CTG’s Mark Taper Forum. In a dual role as creative producer, she supervised more than 50 productions. In 1983, she led the creation of Taper, Too, the Mark Taper Forum’s second theater. As its director, she won nine Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards. Puzo was artistic consultant/co-producer for the Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival and co-producer of Carplays, a multidisciplinary festival presented in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art. She has been a consultant for the NEA, the Pew Charitable Trusts, Theatre Communications Group and the Rockefeller and Lila Wallace Readers Digest foundations, and she has written for American Theatre Magazine and for the stage. Her adaptation of Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” was presented by the Mark Taper Forum for 10 consecutive years and toured Eastern Europe.
Return to top
Bill Rauch
2005 • 2006
Bill Rauch is co-founder and artistic director of Cornerstone Theater Company, where he has directed more than 40 productions in collaboration with diverse communities in Los Angeles and across the nation, including Alison Carey's "For Here or To Go?" at the Mark Taper Forum and the upcoming "Faith-Based Bridge Show" at the Ford Amphitheater. He has also directed at regional theaters including Yale Repertory, Guthrie Theatre, Arena Stage, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, South Coast Repertory, Long Wharf Theatre and Great Lakes Theater Festival. Rauch was the only artist to win the inaugural Leadership for a Changing World Award.
Return to top
Arthur Rieman
2006
Arthur Rieman is managing attorney of The Law Firm for Non-Profits, P.C., which serves the transactional, exemption and tax-related needs of nonprofits in California and throughout the nation. The firm also works with board members, donors and foundations. Rieman also is a founding partner of The Cultural+Planning Group, a consulting firm to nonprofits specializing in business planning, cultural planning and organizational development for nonprofits. His prior legal experience has been as a corporate and employment lawyer with national and boutique law firms, and as general counsel for the media and marketing company that originated the infomercial. Rieman also holds an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School (1979) and a B.A. in communication studies, also from UCLA (1977). After business school he worked for five years launching start-ups in the cable and pay-tv industries. He regularly speaks and writes on such topics as nonprofit board member duties and liability, the Nonprofit Integrity Act, self-dealing, lobbying and political activity, the gray area between nonprofits and for-profit activities, and staying out of trouble with the Attorney General and IRS.
Return to top
Jon Lawrence Rivera
2010
Jon Lawrence Rivera most recently directed Jacques Brel at the Colony Theatre and Oedipus El Rey by Luis Alfaro at the Theatre @ Boston Court (and its original 2008 workshop at the Getty Villa). Other recent works include: The Last Five Years by Jason Robert Brown (with an Asian-American cast at East West Players), Miss Saigon by Schönberg/Boublil, Ruby, Tragically Rotund by Boni B. Alvarez, Laws Of Sympathy by Oliver Mayer, The Joy Luck Club by Susan Kim, Sea Change by Nick Salamone (2009 LA Weekly Award for Direction), The Third From The Left by Jean Colonomos (2008 NY Fringe Festival), Hillary Agonistes by Nick Salamone (2007 NY Fringe Festival Award for Outstanding Direction), Havana Bourgeois by Carlos Lacamara (2008 GLAAD nomination), Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn (Center Theatre Group’s Kirk Douglas Theatre), Conjunto by Oliver Mayer, References To Salvador Dali Make Me Hot by Jose Rivera, the Sondheim/Lapine musical Into The Woods, Barefoot Boy With Shoes On by Edwin Sanchez. A four-time Ovation Award nominee, he is the founding artistic director of Playwrights’ Arena and his productions have garnered over 100 local and international awards.
Return to top
Diane Rodriguez
2007
Diane Rodriguez is a multidisciplinary theatre artist. She is an accomplished actor, anthologized writer, regional theatre director and Associate Producer and Director of New Play Production at Center Theatre Group, Los Angeles. During the 2005-2006 season, Diane directed Nilo Cruz's Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams at Victory Gardens in Chicago, a play she commissioned for the Mark Taper Forum, John Belluso's Pryetown at City Theatre in Pittsburg and Dan Guerrero's Gaytino at the Kirk Douglas Theatre for Center Theatre Group. This season she will direct Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel at City Theatre and will re-stage Pyretown for Playwrights Arena here in Los Angeles. At the Mark Taper Forum she originated the roles of Zoila in Lisa Loomer's Living Out and Minerva in Luis Alfaro's Breakfast Lunch andDinner. This season she performed multiply roles (15 to be exact) in Heather Woodbury's epic Tale of 2 Cities, which opened in Los Angeles and moved to New York. She has appeared in over twenty-five premiere regional theatre productions and was a leading actor with the seminal theatre company El Teatro Campesino for 11 seasons.
Return to top
Judy Rousuck
2005 • 2008
Judy Rousuck was a staff writer for the Baltimore Sun for 33 years and the Sun's theater critic for 23 years. She is currently a theater critic for WYPR, Baltimore's NPR affiliate. She has been on the faculty of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s Critics Institute in Waterford, CT, since 1990. In 1986, she was an on-air theater critic for Maryland Public Television. Before joining the Baltimore Sun, she worked for the Cleveland Press and for Cleveland’s fine arts radio station, WCLV. In 1979-1980 she had a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the University of Michigan, where she studied the impact of business and law on the arts. She has also taught writing at GoucherCollege and NorthwesternUniversity's National High School Institute. She returns to the NEA Journalism Institute at the University of Southern California after serving on its inaugural faculty in 2005. Miss Rousuck is the recipient of numerous prizes including the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild’s awards for criticism, commentary and the Bill Pryor Memorial Grand Prize for Writing.
Return to top
David Sefton
2007
David Sefton was appointed Director of UCLA Performing Arts in October 2000. Previously he was Head of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Festival Hall in London where he created and produced the annual Meltdown Festival, the largest and most influential festival in the Center’s season. His program at Royal Festival Hall focused on the development of music, performance and multimedia and was the recipient of several major awards as well as critical and public acclaim. On arriving in Los Angeles Sefton renamed the series UCLA Live! and created a major programming shift with the introduction of several initiatives, most notably the UCLA International Theatre Festival. Over the past five years he has produced and presented the work of Robert Wilson, Societas Rafaello Sanzio, Complicite, The Globe Theatre, Cheek by Jowl, The Royal Court, Volksbuhne, Forced Entertainment, Wooster Group and Heiner Goebbels – the majority for the first time in Los Angeles, some for the first time in the United States. His Programming at UCLA Live encompasses all forms of music, dance, theatre and spoken Word and is acknowledged as one of the most important presenting institutions in the United States. Focusing on the international, the series encompasses everything from Classical Chinese Opera to Post-Punk Noise-Experiments; from Ballet to Experimental Dance/Performance and from Chamber Recital to Live Art. Described by the New York Times as “the dominant player on the scene…the King-Kong of Southern California performance.” An internationally acclaimed producer and presenter of music, dance and theater, UCLA Live brings hundreds of outstanding and provocative artists to Los Angeles each year. Committed to supporting the development of new work, UCLA Live has presented both major and emerging artists. Lectures, residencies, and extensive outreach programs expand the impact of its unparalleled performances that include a lively mix of distinguished masters and innovators from around the world.
Return to top
Lewis Segal
2008
Lewis Segal has been the staff dance critic at the Los Angeles Times since 1996. Before that, he was Times Dance Writer since 1984. He is responsible for reviews, news stories, interviews, essays and, occasionally, travel-related arts pieces. He also appears periodically as a dance spokes-person on television, most recently on the NBC "Today" show, CNN and in a Russian TV documentary on dancer Alexander Godunov. He holds two Masters degrees (M.A., M.F.A.) in theater from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). In the late 1970s, he won $50,000 on a daytime television quiz show in the category of Shakespeare, used the money for the down-payment on a house in Hollywood, and soon was able to afford frequent trips out of the country: two or three a year these days. Added to his business travel, these trips have made him one of the most widely traveled arts writers of his generation. As an adjunct professor in the department of Theater, he teaches two undergraduate dance history courses each year at the University of Southern California (USC). He has also won two Lester Horton Dance Awards from the DanceResourceCenter, a service organization in Southern California. He is 66, divorced, lives in Hollywood, California.
Return to top
Rachel Shachar
2010
Rachel Shachar is excited to be working with the East West Players. Her recent costume design credits include: A Keshet Chiam dance performance, Der Freischütz at the West Bay Opera, Stray and The Debate Over Courtney O-Connell both with the Chalk Repertory Theater. She designed Danton’s Death, DanceALIVE!, The Skin of Our Teeth, and the Near East, at UC San Diego. In addition, she assisted David Zinn on Tobacco Road at the La Jolla Playhouse, and Holly Hynes at the Julliard School. In the Bay Area she designed several productions: Boys From Syracuse at 42nd Street Moon, Media the Musical at Theater Rhinoceros and Cyrano de Bergerac at Show Gun Players. She received her MFA in costume design from UC San Diego in 2009.
Return to top
Howard Shapiro
2010 • 2011
Howard Shapiro joined The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1970. He has been a general assignment reporter, has held the transportation, public education and State House beats, and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 1980-81. On his return to the city room, he established the demographic beat and covered the findings of the 1980 census. He has been an assistant national editor, assistant foreign editor, assistant city editor in charge of beats and deputy New Jersey editor. In 1988, he became the editor of the newspaper's Weekend section, and after that, the newspaper's cultural arts editor. He went on to become the travel editor, then wrote for seven sections including Travel, Food, Arts, Entertainment and Weekend. Howard began writing theater criticism nine years ago and is now the staff theater critic, reviewing and writing pieces about the theater. Howie is also the Broadway critic for The Classical Network, NPR affiliates in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Colorado. He was a fellow in the second NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater, in 2006, and an Internews Fellow in Greece. He teaches arts criticism and travel writing at Temple University. His reviews and articles for the Inquirer are online at philly.com/inquirer/columnists/howard_shapiro and his Broadway radio reviews are online at wwfm.org/webcasts_broadway.shtml.
Return to top
Ariel Swartley
2009
Ariel Swartley's essays on music, fiction, garden design, art, culinary history, film and architecture have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly, as well as in “The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Women” and “Rock and Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island.” A contributing writer at Los Angeles magazine since 2001, she writes a bimonthly books column. She has kick-boxed for a profile of John Cusack and toured landfills for a story on the Center for Land Use Interpretation. A member of the 2002 inaugural group of USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellows, she is currently a Lucas Artist Programs Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center where she is writing the online catalogue for their 2009 initiative, “Agency: the Work of Artists.”
Return to top
Leslie Tamaribuchi
2005
Leslie Tamaribuchi is the co-producer of the School of Theater at California Institute of the Arts where she serves on the producing faculty. She worked with Cornerstone Theater Company for ten years, serving as managing director for seven, and produced more than 35 ensemble productions. As an adjunct professor, Tamaribuchi has lectured on community-based theater at the University of Southern California. In 2002, Tamaribuchi worked as a producer with the Center for New Theater at CalArts on its inaugural production of "King Lear". She has been an organizational development consultant to nonprofit community-based arts organizations. She collaborated in Japan with shogekijo ("little theater") groups and produced the first U.S. tour of the butoh troupe, Hakutobo. She has served as a panelist for Theatre Communications Group, the California Arts Council, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, and the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department and is a founding board member of the Watts Village Theatre Company. She holds a Masters Degree in Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Return to top
Ella Taylor
2009 • 2010
Ella Taylor is a free-lance film critic, book reviewer and cultural essayist living in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in LA Weekly, the Village Voice and 14 other Village Voice Media papers, npr.org, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and other publications. She was a regular contributor to FilmWeek, a radio show on KPCC public radio in Los Angeles. She has a PhD in sociology, taught mass media at the University of Washington, and is now an adjunct professor in the Cinema School at USC. Her book "Prime-Time Families: Television Culture in Post-War America" was published by the University of California Press.
Return to top
David L. Ulin
2009 • 2010
David L. Ulin is book editor of the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, selected as a Best Book of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune, and the editor of “Another City: Writing from Los Angeles” and the Library of America's “Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology,” which won a 2002 California Book Award. He has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles, LA Weekly, Columbia Journalism Review and National Public Radio’s All Things Considered; his essay “The Half-Birthday of the Apocalypse” was nominated for a 2004 Pushcart Prize. Currently, he teaches in the low residency MFA in Creative Writing program at UC Riverside's Palm Desert Graduate Center. His new book, “The Lost Art of Reading: A Digression” will be published in November.
Return to top
Jack Viertel
2005 • 2006 • 2008 • 2009 • 2010 • 2011
Jack Viertel is the Artistic Director of City Center Encores! and Creative Director of Jujamcyn Theaters. He is in charge of creating and identifying new projects for the company’s five Broadway theaters, and has worked on such productions as The Producers, The Full Monty, Proof, Angels in America, Guys and Dolls, Jelly’s Last Jam, Into the Woods, M. Butterfly, and the plays of August Wilson, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Piano Lesson. Viertel conceived and co-produced the long-running musical revue Smokey Joe’s Café, served as dramaturg for Hairspray, and is the co-author of the musical Time and Again. He spent two years as dramaturg of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and began work in the theater as a critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.
Return to top
Matt Walker
2010
Matt Walker, artistic director of The Troubadour Theater Company since 1995, has directed over 25 original productions, and in 2006 received the O.C. Weekly Theater Award for Career Achievement, and in 2007, the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Sustained Excellence in Theater. Walker has trained with notable performers and organizations including; Bill Irwin, Second City Improvisation, The Royal Shakespeare Co., and The San Francisco Mime Troupe. Walker is also a graduate of Ringling Bros. Clown College, and did time as clown in The Greatest Show On Earth. Walker served as adjunct professor of Clowning and Commedia at the University of California at San Diego for four years, and now teaches and directs MFA acting students at the University of Southern California. Most recently, Matt received commissions to direct two productions at The Getty Villa in Malibu, including an adaptation of Aristophanes’ Frogs, and Oedipus The King Mama, which was #4 in LA Weekly’s 2009 top ten shows of the year.
Return to top
Robert Wallace
2010
Robert Wallace is a National Magazine Award recipient and Emmy-award winning journalist with an extensive background in media. As a print journalist, he has worked as vice-president and editor of Rolling Stone Magazine, editorial director of Talk Magazine, editor-in-chief of Men's Journal and Rocky Mountain Magazine, senior editor at Newsweek, and features editor at the Denver Post; as a book editor, he served as vice-president and editor-in-chief of St. Martin's Press and Wenner Books; and as a television producer he was a senior producer and senior story editor for Diane Sawyer at ABC News and a vice-president of content development and production at ESPN. He is currently consulting for ESPN and other clients through his companies Wallace Media Inc. and Tumbling Dice Productions. A graduate of Stanford University, he currently lives in Los Angeles.
Return to top
Ann E. Wareham
2009
Ann E. Wareham (CTG Associate Producer) is now in her 29th year with Center Theatre Group, and has produced for CTG such plays as Spring Awakening, Pippin, No Child…, Sweeney Todd, En Un Sol Amarillo, Distracted, Sleeping Beauty Wakes, Edward Scissorhands, In the Continuum, Pyrenees, The Black Rider, Without Walls, Stuff Happens, Like Jazz, The Talking Cure, A Perfect Wedding and Putting It Together. She served as Producing Associate to Gordon Davidson during his tenure. Ann has also produced plays at the Victory Theatre, the CAST Theatre and the Met.
Return to top
Jeff Weinstein
2009 • 2010 • 2011
Jeff Weinstein has been a columnist, critic, and senior editor for visual arts and architecture at the Village Voice; a managing editor of Artforum magazine; fine arts editor and popular culture columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and most recently arts and culture editor at Bloomberg News, New York. Author of Life in San Diego and Learning To Eat, he has written about the arts, gay issues, food and style for the New Yorker, Art in America, Los Angeles magazine and many other publications. His short story “A Jean-Marie Cookbook” was awarded a Pushcart Prize in 1982. Jeff is a founder of the National Writers Union and established the idea of domestic partnership benefits, first won by the Village Voice union at the bargaining table in 1982. He began a series of essays about culture, food, and gay issues called “Out There” on the online site ArtsJournal in 2007 and serves as deputy director of the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program. Jeff lives in New York City with his spouse, artist and critic John Perreault.
Return to top
Kristina Wong
2010
Kristina Wong is a solo performer, writer, actor, educator, culture jammer, and filmmaker. Her body of performance work includes short and full-length solo performance works, outrageous street theater stunts and pranks, subversive internet installations, and plays and sketch comedy. She was awarded the Creative Capital Award in Performance and a Creation Fund from the National Performance Network to create her third full-length solo show, "Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," exploring the remarkably high incidence of suicide among Asian American women in a world that's more nuts than we are. A concert film version of “Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest” is currently in post-production. Kristina’s show "Free?" was featured at Comedy Central's South Beach Comedy Festival in Miami and the Hip-Hop Theater festivals in New York and the Bay Area. Kristina was the commencement speaker for the 2008 UCLA Department of English graduation. She is completing a novel started with the PEN USA Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship. She is a freelance contributor to anthologies and magazines that include Playgirl. Kristina newest work, “Cat Lady,” moves into a new direction as Kristina’s first foray into writing a multimedia theater piece for an ensemble of five performers including herself. “Cat Lady” explores loneliness, existential crises and relearning the art of human intimacy through cat ladies, professional pick-up artist technique and a recent rash of spraying problems from her cat Oliver. The work has received support from the MacDowell Colony, the MAPFUND, the Center for Cultural Innovation, and a National Performance Network Creation Fund and premieres in 2011. Her mail order bride website is www.bigbadchinesemama.com. Her personal website is www.kristinawong.com.
Return to top
Elizabeth Zimmer
2008
Elizabeth Zimmer, a native New Yorker, writes about dance, theater, and books for Dance Magazine, The Australian, and the free New York daily Metro, and contributes to many other publications. She served as the dance editor of New York’s Village Voice from 1992 until 2006, and reviewed ballet for the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1997 through 2005. Since 1972 she has reviewed dance in cities across North America, and taught writing and dance history at several universities. Since 1979 she has consulted for the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, and adjudicates choreography and performance for the American College Dance Festival Association. She began her career as a broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Halifax and Vancouver, returning to New York to manage the American Dance Guild. Her “Kamikaze Writing Workshop” is a feature of the annual meetings of the Dance Critics Association, and she has lectured on various dance subjects in Taiwan, Taormina, and New York. She edited two widely respected books, Body Against Body: The Dance and other Collaborations of Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane (Station Hill Press, 1989) and Envisioning Dance for Film and Video (Routledge, 2002), and developed a dance history curriculum for teachers in urban schools.She has studied standup comedy, yoga, Pilates, and many forms of dance, appearing in the work of New York choreographers including Christopher Williams, Kriota Willberg, and Tina Croll; her one-woman show, North Wing, was recently produced at two off-off-Broadway theaters.
Return to top
Home | How To Apply | About the Program | Past Fellows | Faculty & Experts | Schedules | Press | Staff | FAQ