Yale School of Drama Announces Department Changes

YALE SCHOOL OF DRAMA announces the retirement of Professor Adjunct Edward A. Martenson, Chair of the Theater Management Department, effective June 30, 2017, and the appointment of Professor Adjunct Joan Channick, who currently serves as Associate Dean, as the new Chair, effective July 1, 2017.

Ron Van Lieu, the Lloyd Richards Professor Adjunct of Acting, will retire from the School of Drama on June 30, 2017. Gregory Wallace will join the faculty as Professor Adjunct, effective January 1, 2017.

THEATER MANAGEMENT DEPARTMENT

During a career spanning more than thirty years, Edward A. Martenson has been a theatre manager, a grantmaker, a teacher, and a consultant. As a theatre manager, Mr. Martenson helped bring 140 productions to the stage, including 25 world or American premieres and 20 plays by Shakespeare. As Executive Director of the Guthrie Theater from 1986 to 1997, heworked with Artistic Director Garland Wright to rebuild the resident Acting Company, renovate the theater facilities, increase the endowment from $4 million to $32 million, and set new records for season tickets and giving. As Managing Director of Yale Repertory Theatre from 1979 to 1982, Mr. Martenson worked with Artistic Director Lloyd Richards to reposition Yale Rep as a teaching theatre and institute the Winterfest of New Plays. From 1973 to 1979 he served as General Manager and Managing Director of the McCarter Theatre under Artistic Director Michael Kahn, during the time it separated from Princeton University and established itself as an independent theatre institution. As Theater Program Director of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1982 to 1986, he oversaw more than $50 million in operating and capital grants to theatre artists and organizations throughout the country and designed a program to prevent the disappearance of resident acting ensembles. Since 1997, Mr. Martenson has worked with National Arts Strategies to develop executive education programs in conjunction with faculty from schools of business at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, and Northwestern. Other consulting clients have included the Alley Theatre, Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, and La Jolla Playhouse. He returned to Yale in 2006 as Chair of the Theater Management Department. His tenure is distinguished by the recruitment and retention of some of the nation's most gifted institutional leaders to its faculty, the introduction of the case study as a primary teaching tool, the establishment of regular peer reviews, increasing the frequency of joint degree study at the School of Management, and the founding of the Theater Management Knowledge Base, an internet-based resource for arts managers around the world.

Joan Channick has served as Associate Dean of Yale School of Drama since 2009 and is a Professor Adjunct of Theater Management. She worked previously as Managing Director of New Haven's Long Wharf Theatre and as Managing Director of Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the New York-based national service organization for the not-for-profit professional theatre field, in which capacity she also served as Director of the U.S. Center of the International Theatre Institute. Other positions she has held include Associate Managing Director of Center Stage in Baltimore and Marketing Director of Yale Repertory Theatre. Preceding her theatre career, she practiced securities litigation with the Boston law firm of Gaston Snow & Ely Bartlett. Joan currently chairs the Yale Cabaret board, is on the board of the Foundry Theatre in New York, and sits on the Yale-China Association's board of trustees. She has served on the boards of the National Corporate Theatre Fund, the League of Professional Theatre Women, the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, the American Theatre Exchange Initiative, The Ensemble Company for the Performing Arts, and Chase Brexton Health Services, and has also been a member of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO, the International Theatre Institute executive council, and the League of Resident Theatres executive committee. She has written for American Theatre magazine and is the author of "The Changing Legal Environment for the Arts," a chapter in the book The Art of Governance, published by TCG. Joan has also taught in Goucher College's arts administration program. She is a graduate of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and Yale School of Drama. As part of her transition to Chair of the Theater Management Department, effective July 1, 2017, Joan Channick will step away from her role as Associate Dean, and the School will initiate a search for a new Associate Dean later this summer.

"An exemplary citizen and colleague, Ed Martenson has been passionately engaed with the wide-ranging artistic sensibility of our community, and worked tirelessly with the department chairs to confirm significant strategic issues for the School as a whole. Here, as elsewhere, he has dedicated to making better environments for artists and for the making of art: no one in the history of Theater Management Department has done more to codify its content and practices for the benefit of Yale students and the field," says Dean James Bundy. "We turn with utmost confidence to Joan Channick, who in the last seven years has revolutionized the way the School attends to student life, as the next leader of the program. Her expertise and profound personal commitment make her the ideal person to advance the aims of the program, and to ensure that the School will continue to attract and support the finest teachers and students of Theater Management in the world."

ACTING DEPARTMENT

Ron Van Lieu has served as the Lloyd Richards Professor Adjunct of Acting at Yale School of Drama since 2004. He served as Chair of the Acting program from 2004 through June 2014. Mr. Van Lieu trained at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. His acting credits include major regional theatres, leading roles off-Broadway, the New York Shakespeare Festival, The Public Theater, Playwrights Horizons, and the Milwaukee Repertory Theater, where he was a member of the Acting Company. His directing credits include productions at Playwrights Horizons, The Public Theater, Syracuse Stage, the Greer Garson Theater in Santa Fe, and over 50 productions at the NYU Graduate Acting Program. For 29 years he was a Master Teacher of Acting at the New York University Tisch Graduate Acting Program. For many years he served as Chair of the NYU program where he also founded and headed Studio Tisch, a developmental workshop for graduates of the acting program. In 1993 he was awarded the New York University Distinguished Teaching Medal, the university's highest award given in recognition of outstanding achievement in classroom teaching. In addition to his university work, Mr. Van Lieu is a founding faculty member of both The Shakespeare Lab at the New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theater where he headed the actor training for 10 years, as well as The Actors Center in New York where he is a member of the board and continues to teach both professional actors as well as teachers of acting. Students who have trained with Mr. Van Lieu have won every major award in the field of theatre and acting including the Pulitzer Prize, Academy Awards, Tony Awards, Drama Desk Awards, Golden Globes, Emmys, OBIEs, among others.

Gregory Wallace, who will join the Yale School of Drama faculty on January 1, 2017, as Professor Adjunct of Acting, received his BFA from the Stella Adler Conservatory at New York University and his MFA from Yale School of Drama in 1987. He currently serves as Head of Graduate Acting at the University of California, San Diego. MR. Wallace is an Associate Artist at American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) in San Francisco and has been a company member and faculty at A.C.T. for twelve years. He has received multiple nominations for the competitive San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award, including his 2008 performance in 'Tis Pity She's A Whore; the Back Stage West Garland Award for his 2001 performance in The Misanthrope; and three San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Awards for performance for Angels in America (1995), Insurrection: Holding History (1999), and The Tosca Project (2010). His recent theatre work includes leading roles in productions of Clybourne Park, Scapin, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and The Government Inspector, working with directors including John Doyle, Carey Perloff, Israel Hicks, Bill Irwin, John Rando, MarK Wing-Davey, and Laird Williamson. He has appeared on Broadway in Our Country's Good directed by Mark Lamos, in other major New York theatres including the New York Shakespeare Festival/The Public Theater and New York Theatre Workshop, and at leading regional theatres such as the Guthrie Theater, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and Yale Rep. He has also worked in film and television in Los Angeles. MR. Wallace was also the recipient of the Fox Fellowship from 2005-2007, studying Corporeal Mime and Movement in the U.S., Paris, and London. MR. Wallace has demonstrated a continuing commitment to diversity, especially during his time at A.C.T. He has been a primary recruiter and mentor to A.C.T.'s African American students, a consultant to the artistic director on diversity issues in season planning, and he served as a member of A.C.T.'s Diversity Council.

"Among the notable results of Ron Van Lieu's efforts at Yale have been the department's sustained success in recruitment and training; a sense of delightful play and possibility in our theatres every time the lights go down and actors begin to perform; and superb work being done in the profession by recent graduates. Ron's powers of observation and his expert instruction go hand in hand with his genuine care for, and curiosity about, the people he teaches, and his enthusiastic exhortation of young actors to bring not only craft, but also the courage of their conviction, to each scene, to each play, and to the art form," says Dean James Bundy. "I am delighted to welcome Gregory Wallace back to Yale School of Drama as a member of the Acting Department faculty. He brings an extraordinary range of performance experience in new and classic plays and devised work and has a deft and seasoned hand as teacher and director, developed in two of the nation's top conservatories, and a track record of traveling widely to recruit actors of color to his programs."

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