Alexandra Scott Billings is an American transgender actress. She is the first trans-woman to have played a transgender character on television. She has played transsexual characters in episodes of ER and Grey's Anatomy. Her television credits include an appearance on ABC in an episode of Karen Sisco, and an appearance in the 2003 made for TV movie, Romy and Michelle: A New Beginning. She has performed at The Bailiwick Theater and at the Tony Award winning Steppenwolf Theatre. Her playwright collaborations include working with the authors: Larry Kramer, Tina Landau, and Jamie Pachino.
Bart DeLorenzo is a Los Angeles based theater director and producer. He is the founding artistic director of the Evidence Room theater, a 14-year-old company renowned in Los Angeles for contemporary theater productions. At the Evidence Room theater, he produced award-winning productions of Thorton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, Charles L. Mee's The Berlin Circle, and Robert Prior's Speed-Hedda. He has participated in the development of new plays at South Coast Reperatory's Pacific Playwrights Festival, the Mark Taper Forum's New Work festival, A.S.K. Theater Projects, the Ojai Playwrights Conference, Madison Reperatory, and the California Institute of the Arts. In 2006, he directed the Center Theatre Group's kick-off premiere event of Suzan-Lori Parks' 365 Days/365 Plays outdoors at the Los Angeles Music Center plaza and on the steps of Walt Disney Concert Hall. In 2005-2007, he directed the world premiere of Sandra Tsing Loh's long-running Mother on Fire at the 24th Street Theater, and subsequent revivals at the Pasadena Playhouse, the Sundance Film Festival, and the Women's Building in San Francisco. In 2007, he directed the world premiere of Donald Margulies' Shipwrecked! An Entertainment starring Gregory Itzin at the South Coast Reperatory Theatre, which was later revived at the Geffen Playhouse. In 2008, he directed the world premiere of Joan Rivers: A Work in Progress by a Life in Progress at the Geffen Playhouse. In 2009, he directed Mark Brown's adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days at the Cleveland Playhouse. He has received five LA Weekly Theater Awards for Direction and Production and three Back Stage Garlands for Production, Adaptation, and Local Hero Director.
Bill Irwin is an American actor and clown known for his contribution to the renaissance of American circus during the 1970s. He is most well-known for his vaudeville stage acts, but he has made a number of appearances on film and television. He performed onstage with Steve Martin and Robin Williams in Waiting for Godot in 1988. In 2002, he performed onstage with Sally Fields in The Goat or Who is Sylvia? His other stage credits include: The Regard of the Flight (1982), Largely New York (1989), Fool Man (1993), The Harelquin Studies (2003), and Mr. Fox: A Rumination (2004). His screen credits include: Igby Goes Down (2002), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999), Ride with the Devil (1998), Silent Tongue (1993), and Stepping Out (1991). In 1981 and 1983, Irwin was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Choreographer's Fellowship. In 1984 he was named a Guggenheim Fellow and was the first performance artist to be awarded a 5-year MacArthur Fellowship. In 2005, he won a Tony Award for his onstage performance with Kathleen Turner as George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Brian Michael teaches directing and acting at The FolkwangHochschule in Essen, Germany. He is a freelance director for theatre and opera. He oversees a three part Shakespeare project in three different languages: German, Czech, and English.
Camryn Manheim is an American actor, most well-known for her roles on ABC's The Practice and CBS's The Ghost Whisperer. In 1999, Manheim received both an Emmy and a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in The Practice as the attorney, Ellenor Frutt. Her film and television credits include: Scary Movie 3, Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion, Two and a Half Men, Will and Grace, Ally McBeal, Elvis, and How I Met Your Mother. Her autobiography, Wake Up, I'm Fat! was published by Broadway Books in 1999, and became a New York Times Best Seller.
Catherine Fitzmaurice began acting in theatre when she was three. From age ten to seventeen, she studied voice, speech, verse-speaking, and acting with Barbara Bunch, who was also Cicely Berry's earliest teacher. Catherine then attended for three years the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, England, where she was a scholarship holder and prize winner, and where she continued her study of classical voice training techniques with Cicely Berry and others. While a student there, Catherine won the prestigious English Festival of Spoken Poetry, sponsored by Edith Sitwell and T. S. Eliot. She began teaching Voice, Verse-speaking, and Prose reading at the Central School in 1965. As a teacher, Catherine found some of her students were incapable of being sufficiently vocally expressive. She saw the primary problem as inhibition caused by tension, particularly around the breathing, and in exploring ways to reduce this she discovered the work of Wilhelm Reich. She began to adapt some of his work for voice training and incorporated it into her classes. Since then, she has continued to study body-based disciplines and energy work (yoga, shiatsu, meditation, healing techniques, etc.). She has adapted and combined them with her classical training to form Fitzmaurice Voicework. Now based in New York City, Catherine has taught all over the world, and has held teaching and consulting appointments at the Central School of Speech and Drama, the Juilliard School's Drama Division, Yale School of Drama, New York University, Harvard University, the Moscow Art Theatre, the Stratford Shakespearean Festival, the Guthrie Theatre, Lincoln Center, and many others. She has also presented her work internationally at major medical and theatre conferences.
Charles Marowitz is an American writer, theater director, and playwright. He is the founder and artistic director of The Open Space Theatre in London. His black comedy, Sherlock's Last Case, was presented on Broadway starring Frank Lagella in the lead role. His most recent directorial credit is Temptation by Vaclav Havel, which he directed at The National Theatre of the Czech Republic in Prague. Marrowitz is also the author of over two dozen books including: The Other Checkhov, Murdering Marlowe, and Stage Dust: A Critic's Cultural Scrapbook of the 1990s. His play, Murdering Marlowe, was selected as a finalist for the Gladd Awards of 2002. Marrowitz is the founder of Encore Magazine. He is also a regular contributor to Swans Commentary, a cultural political bi-weekly.
Culture Clash is a Latino/Chicano comedy and theatre group founded by Richard Montoy, Ric Salinas, and Herbert Siguenza. The theatre group began in 1984 on Cinco de Mayo at Rene Yanez's Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco, California. Culture Clash is known for performing social and political satires. They have performed at various prominent venues including: New York's Lincoln Center for Performing Arts, Miami's Colony Theatre, and Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum. Their publications include: Life, Death and Revolutionary Comedy (1998) and Culture Clash in AmeriCCa: Four Plays (2003).
David Bridel is a stage director, choreographer, playwright and master teacher of acting. For Academy Award winner William Friedkin, he has choreographed Ariadne Auf Naxos (Los Angeles Opera), Salome and Das Gehege (Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich). For the MFA at UCLA, he wrote and directed I Gelosi (2006), and The Death of Mayakovsky (2007). For the Franklin Stage Company, where he is co-Artistic Director, he has directed A Doll's House, What the Butler Saw, Hedda Gabler, Eurydice, Dog in the Manger, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, The Lesson & The Chairs, Uncle Vanya, and co-directed The Tempest. He has written and directed The Heretic Mysteries and The Legend of the Dead Soldier. Other directing includes Medea (Cal Reperatory Theatre), Glengarry Glen Ross, Ivanov, No-one Knows How (New York), Fortinbras (Crossroads New Jersey), The Tower, The Mill on the Floss, The Misanthrope, As You Like It (Tel Aviv), Rhinoceros (London), and The Taming of the Shrew (Bloomsbury Theater, London, and European Tour). His other plays include The Last Girl, Shreds & Fancies (London New Play Festival), Death of an Actress (Southwark Playhouse), 100 Years of Enchantment (Oval House and Union Chapel), The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Mainbrace Theatre), The Story of Peter Vanicek (Nitra International Theater Festival, Slovakia), and The Actors Rehearse the Story of Charlotte Salomon. Mr. Bridel has taught and directed for many of the leading actor-training programs at drama schools and universities across the United States including SUNY Purchase, UCLA, Cal Arts, Cal State Long Beach, Rutgers University, NYU (the Atlantic School), and The Actors Center in New York. He is co-founder and master teacher of Studio Six, LA's first Clown School. In 2008, he choreographer Il Tabarro at the L.A. Opera and was the Commedia dell'Arte and Movement Director for The School of Night at the Mark Taper Forum, for which he received a Best Special Events Award from Entertainment Today.
David Zinder is an internationally acclaimed director and acting teacher. He received his BA in Drama Studies at Manchester University in England. He also completed his PhD. in Drama Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the faculty of the Theatre Arts Deparment at Tel Aviv University in 1976. While teaching, he became influenced by the work of Eugenio Barba, Joseph Cahikin, and Anton Checkhov. The influence of these three figures helped Zinder form the basis for the development of his own unique acting training system called, ImageWork Training. Over the years, Zinder's ImageWork Training has taken him throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe, as well as to the far east, where he is regularly invited to teach at the Practice Performing Arts School in Singapore. His book on acting training, Body Voice Imagination: A Training for the Actor, was publsihed in 2002 by Routledge in New York. The book has been recently re-published in an expanded and revised second edition, which includes a new chapter on the connections between ImageWork Training and Checkhov Technique. At the moment, Zinder is involved in establishing a new school for the arts, which will include theatre as well as film & television studies, at a new college in the Tel Aviv area of Israel. The school is due to open in 2010.
Deb Barylski is a casting director. Her casting credits include the popular television shows: Arrested Development, Just Shoot Me, Home Improvement, Costello, Life With Bonnie, State of Romance, and Emeril. She won an Emmy Award for Comedy Television Casting in 2004 for the pilot and first season of Arrested Development.
Debi Manwiller is a casting director. Her casting credits include the popular television shows: 24, Lincoln Heights, L.A. Doctors, Normal Ohio, Picket Fences, The Unusuals, and Chicago Hope. In 1996, she won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Casting for the series, Chicago Hope. In 2004, she won another Emmy Award for Outstanding Casting in a Drama Series for her work on 24.
Elizabeth Swain is an actress, director, and teacher. She has taught at NYU, Hunter College, CCNY, and Marymount Manhattan College. Her recent directing credits include: A Midsummer Night's Dream at CSULB, Medea for the Antaeus company, and Macbeth for the NY State Theatre Institute. Her stage credits include: School for Scandal, Alice Thro' the Looking Glass, Epitaph for George Dillon, Witness for the Prosecution, The Crucible, Tango, Charley's Aunt, Crown Matrimonial, Sherlock Holmes, The Lady's Not Burning, and The Day after the Fair. Her television credits include five years on the soap opera, Guiding Light, and stunts on As the World Turns, One Life to Live, and Dark Shadows. She has also recorded over fifty books for the blind.
Iris Bahr is a critically acclaimed writer, actor, director, and radio persona. Her most recent solo work, DAI (enough), just won the Lucille Lortel Award for Best Solo Show. Her first solo show, Planet America, received an LA Weekly nomination for Outstanding Solo Show. She is best known for her recurring role as the Orthodox Jewish girl on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Her memoir, Dork Whore, was released this last Spring by Bloomsbury Press and has been translated into Italian, German, and Portuguese.
Jeff Perry is an American actor. He is one of the original co-founders of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, Illinois. His stage credits include: Time of your Life, Grapes of Wrath, and The Caretaker. Perry has also acted in many television shows and films. He is best known as the die-hard Grateful Dead fan and police inspector, Harvey Leek, on the TV show, Nash Bridges. His other film and television credits include: Wild Things, The Human Stain, Hard Promises, The Grifters, My So-Called Life, The West Wing, The Practice, Lost, Cold Case, Raines, and Grey's Anatomy. Recently, he replaced John Billingsley in the role of Terrence Steadman in the critically-acclaimed TV show, Prison Break.
Joe Mantegna is an American actor, producer, writer, and director. He is best known for his roles in the box office hits: The Three Amigos, The Godfather Part III, Forget Paris, and Up Close & Personal. Mantegna has been nominated for three Emmy Awards for his roles in three different miniseries consisting of: The Last Don, The Rat Pack, and The Starter Wife. Mantegna has a recurring role in the animated series, The Simpsons, as the voice of mob boss, Anthony "Fat Tony" D'Amico. His stage credits include: Hair, Working, A Life in the Theater, The Dissapearance of Jews at the Goodman Theater, and Speed the Plow. Mantegna won a Tony award for his portrayal of Richard Roma in David Mamet's play, Glengarry Glen Ross. He has had a long and successful relationship with Mamet, appearing in a number of his works. Mantegna also cowrote the successful Off-Broadway play, Bleacher Burns.
John Langs is a freelance director located in Santa Monica, California. His directing credits include: The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World, Eurydice, and King Lear among others. He has directed productions for various prominent theatre companies including: The Seattle Shakespeare Company, The Lookingglass Theatre Company, and the Circle X Theatre Company. His direction of The Brothers Karamazov received the Garland Award for Best Direction in 2007. In 2009, he received the Gregory Award for Outsanding Director of the Year for his direction of The Adding Machine.
Karl Baumann is an MFA student in the Digital Arts New Media Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His background is in Film and Cultural Anthropology. He is currently working on his thesis project, Lebenverse. Lebenverse is a multi-medium documentary that engages with issues of historical construction and its entangled relationship with individual memory, social identity, political agency, and personal media. The documentary moves from the intersection of the first Persian Gulf War and the Rodney King incident to current digital landscape issues surrounding Iraq War videos, the Oscar Grant Oakland BART murder case, and the Iranian “twitter revolution." He intends on expanding the educational possibilities of documentary based media by utilizing interactive technologies that allow participants to physically engage systems which represent larger historical and social issues.
Kathleen Chopin is a casting director. Her casting credits include the popular movies: Along Came Polly, I am Legend, Recount, The Bounty Hunter, and The Love Guru. In 2008, she won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Casting for a Miniseries, Movie, or Special, for her casting in the miniseires, John Adams. She also won an Artios Award in 2008 for Outstanding Achievement in Casting-Television Movie, for her casting in Recount.
Levardis Robert Martyn Burton, Jr., professionally known as LeVar Burton, is an American actor, director, and author, who first came to prominence portraying Kunta Kinte in the 1977 award-winning ABC television miniseries Roots, based on the novel by Alex Haley. He is well known for his portrayal of Geordi La Forge on the syndicated science fiction series Star Trek: The Next Generation, and for his portrayal of Planeteer Kwame on Captain Planet and the Planeteers. LeVar Burton is also the host of the PBS children's program Reading Rainbow.
Lucas Caleb Rooney is an American actor. His stage credits include: She Stoops to Conquer, Mimesophobia, A Streetcar Named Desire, Dirty Blonde, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night's Dream, All My Sons, and Complete Female Stage Beauty. In 2004, he performed on Broadway in Jack O'Brien's production of Henry IV. His Off-Broadway solo-show, Creation: A Clown Show, premeired Off-Broadway at the Lincoln Center in New York City. In 2007, he starred as Neil Quinn in the feature film, On Broadway, also starring Joey McIntyre, Eliza Dusnky, and Amy Phoeler. His television credits include numerous guest appearances on the popular TV shows: Law & Order, One Last Thing, Cold Case, CSI: Miami, and Journeyman. Rooney currently teaches Clown classes at The Actors Center in New York. He also is apprentice to Christopher Bayes at Yale University.
Marcos Martinez directed and wrote the documentary, Estrellas. In 2007, Estrellas was nominated for a Silver Condor Award for Best Documentary Feature and Best Screenplay.
Marin Hinkle is an American actor, perhaps best known for playing the role of Judith on the hit series Two and a Half Men. Her television credits include: Another World, Once and Again, Spin City, Law & Order, Without a Trace, ER, and House. Her stage credits include performing in August Strindberg's Miss Julie, opposite Reg Rogers, at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre in New York City. She also starred in the 2008 thrillers, Quarantine and The Haunting of Molly Hartley.
Matt Walker is an American film and television actor and director. His film and television credits include appearances in Grande Drip, Absolute Zero, The Princess Diaries 2: A Royal Engagement, Raising Helen, Guardian Angel, Judging Amy, CSI, Shock Treatment, and Life Goes On. Walker has worked with many notable actors, including: Kate Hudson, Melanie Griffith, John Goodman, Lea Thompson, Andy Dick, and Willford Brimley. He has also directed various TBS television shows such as Dinner and a Movie, Movies For Guys Who Like Movies, The Man Made Movie, Movie & A Makeover, and Big Playstation Saturday.
Michael Foley is a playwright. Baggage Claim marks his debut as a playwright. His other stage credits include: The Fifth of July, The Dying Art, and The Prozac Players Present Come On Get Happy. His television credits include: General Hospital, The Young and The Restless, Days of Our Lives, and The Bold and the Beautiful.
Philip Charles MacKenzie is an American actor and director. He is currently on the faculty at the Actors Center in New York City. He made his on-screen debut in Sidney Lumet's 1975 crime drama, Dog Day Afternoon. He has played numerous guest roles on popular television shows such as: Three's Company, The Love Boat, Cheers, Family Ties, Remington Steele, and Bosom Buddies. In 1984, he played his most important role as Donald Maltby, a flamboyantly gay character, on Showtime Network in the critically acclaimed series, Brothers. The show was considered groundbreaking because it was arguably the first American sitcom to portray positive gay role models. MacKenzie won the Cable Ace Award for Best Actor in a Comedy Series for his portrayal of Donald Maltby. In 1987, MacKenzie began directing episodes of Brothers. Thereafter, he directed episodes of more than 30 network and cable TV series, running the gamut from Roseanne to Frasier to Just Shoot Me, and Suddenly Susan. In 1998, he directed the film, Attention Shoppers, starring Nestor Carbonell and Luke Perry.
Rachel Lampert is a playwright, actor, director, and choreographer. She attended Mount Holyoke College and has a BFA and MFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. She is a 4-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Choreographer's Fellowship. She is currently the artistic director of The Kitchen Theatre Company in Ithaca, New York. Her playwrighting, directing, and choreography credits at The Kitchen Theatre Company include: Bed No Breakfast, Comfort Food, Tony & The Soprano, The Angle of the Sun, Precious Nonsense, The Trial, The Book Club, Frankenstein, The Glass Menagerie, The Price, Master Class, Gutenberg! The Musical!, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? among others. She is also active outside of Ithaca, New York. Her play, Bet You Can't Catch It, was comissioned by AIDS Work of Tompkins County as part of an educational program for teens and tourced Central NY for three years. She has worked on productionsfor Cal Rep, Arkansas Repertory Theatre, Portland Stage Company, New York's Public Theatre, Mill Mountain Theatre, and Hawaii Opera Theatre. Her concert dance works have been in the repertories of numerous dance companies in the U.S. and abroad. Her trip to China in 1997 to stage West Side Story resulted in her writing The Soup Comes Last, which was produced off-Broadway at 59E59 Theaters in the Fall of 2004. In 2004, she also received a SALT Award for Best Actress.
Rachel Rosenthal is an interdisciplinary performance artist, teacher, and animal rights activist based in Los Angeles, CA. In 1955, she moved to California and created the experimental Instant Theatre. She was a leading figure in the L.A. Women's Art Movement in the 1970s, co-founding WomanSpace, among other projects. In 1989, Rosenthal founded The Rachel Rosenthal Company. The company's repertoire deals with themes such as environmental destruction, social justice, animal rights, and earth-based spirituality. The performances integrate voice, text, movement, music, video production, theatrical costuming, set design, and dramatic lighting together. Ultimately, the company's performances challenge the rigid boundaries between theater and performance art, creating a "total theater" experience. In the last twenty five years of Rosenthal's career, critics have called her "a monument and a marvel." She has toured extensively in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Australia. Her awards include: the Vesta Award (1983), the OBIE Award (1989), the Artcore Award (1991), the Women's Caucus for Art Honor Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts (1994), and The Fresno Art Museum's Distinguished Artist Award (1994). In 1997, she received the LA Weekly Theater Career Achievement Award.
Sha Newman is an award winning director and choreographer. Her recent shows include: A Christmas Carol, West Side Story, I Love A Piano & Love Sweet Love. Her productions of Joseph & The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Ragtime for Fullerton CLO were voted in the Register's Top Ten Shows in Orange County. Her production of The King & I received an L.A. Times Critics Pick. She garnered the Back Stage West Garland Award for her choreography in Cabaret (So. Bay CLO) and Paint Your Wagon (Fullerton CLO). She also received a Robby Award for Best Director for her production of Seven Brides For Seven Brothers (Fullerton CLO).
Sybl Wickersheimer is a set designer, teacher, and fine artist based in Los Angeles. She received her M.F.A. in Set Design from the UCLA School of Theatre, Film and Television in 1999. In 2009, she designed Our Mother's Brief Affair for South Coast Reperatory, No Way To Treat A Lady for the Colony Theatre, Love Water for the Ensemble Studio, Brand New Kid for South Coast Reperatory, The Trial of the Castonvill 9 for The Actor's Gang, Eclipsed for the Kirk Douglas Theatre, and The Rover for the USC School of Theatre. Nationally, Wickersheimer has designed sets for the Lookinglass Theatre in Chicago, The Berkeley Reperatory, The National Theatre Conservatory in Denver, The Sheridan Opera House in Telluride, The Utah Musical Theatre in Portland, and at sea on the Disney Cruise Ship. She has taught at University of Southern California, Los Angeles City College, Pepperdine University, and California State University, Long Beach.
The Troubadour Theatre Company is a Commedia Del Arte flavored, Los angeles based ensemble of actors, muscians, and comedians. Since 1955, the company has been performing for audiences throughout all of Southern California. The Troubadour Theater Company was one of the five arts organizations selected by the Santa Monica City Council to program youth entertainment at the newly renovated Miles Memorial Playhouse in Santa Monica. The company's other awards include: The 2006 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Sustained Excellence in Theatre, and The 2005 OC Weekly Helena Modjeska Career Achievement Award for Contribution to Orange County Theater.
