Interested in generating your own work? Join us as we speak with three accomplished directors, all hybrid theatre artists who are making work in very different ways, about their approaches to sustaining creativity and making exciting, dynamic work.
Audience members are invited to stay afterwards for a reading of
Leigh Fondakowski's Spill, a new play about the Deepwater Horizon / BP oil spill, written and directed by
Leigh Fondakowski and created in collaboration with visual artist Reeva Wortel. For reservations to this free reading, visit the website at
wcs.cultureproject.org/spill.
ABOUT THE PANELISTS
Rachel Alderman is a director, actor, and teaching artist based in New Haven, CT where she serves as the President of the award-winning ensemble company, A Broken Umbrella Theatre. She is the recipient of the 2013 Denham Fellowship from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation in support of her work Freewheelers created by A Broken Umbrella Theatre and presented by The International Festival of Arts & Ideas this past June. Most recently, she assisted
Michael Wilson on the premiere of
Elizabeth Egloff's Ether Dome at The
Alley Theatre in Houston, TX as well as the remount of the Broadway Production of
Horton Foote's Dividing the Estate at The Alley and
The Old Globe in San Diego. At Hartford Stage she assisted Hana Sharif on
August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean. For New Haven's Collective Consciousness Theatre, Rachel directed the premiere of hip-hop poet/playwright
Aaron Jafferis' Stories of a New America performed by a mix of professional actors and refugees. Selected performance credits include:
Long Wharf Theatre (
Paula Vogel's Civil War Christmas, directed by
Tina Landau),
Ars Nova's ANT Fest (1 Night Only: A Hanukkah Jamboree by composer/lyricist Rob Shapiro), Elm Shakespeare, Theatre 4 and many A Broken Umbrella Theatre original adventures. Rachel graduated summa cum laude with a BA in Theatre from Muhlenberg College.
Leigh Fondakowski was the Head Writer of The Laramie Project and has been a member of
Tectonic Theatre Project since 1995. She is an Emmy nominated co-screenwriter for the adaptation of The Laramie Project for HBO, and a co-writer of The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later. Her play, The People's Temple, has been performed under her direction at
Berkeley Repertory Theatre, American Theater Company, and The Guthrie Theater, and received the Glickman Award for Best New Play in the Bay Area in 2005. Another original play, I Think I Like Girls, premiered at Encore Theater in San Francisco under her direction and was voted one of the top 10 plays of 2002 by The Advocate. Leigh is a 2007 recipient of the NEA/TCG Theatre Residency Program for Playwrights and a 2009 Macdowell Colony Fellow. She is a visiting artist and an Imagine Fund fellow at the University of Minnesota, and has recently written a new play about 19th-century American actress
Charlotte Cushman.
Maija Garcia is director of Organic Magnetics (OM), a theater arts organization that produces live installations by sustainable design, generating mixed-media and cross-cultural collaborations. Garcia directed and produced Ghosts of Manhattan, an interactive history - moving audiences through five centuries of cultural evolution in NYC, at Fort Tryon Park. Artist in Residence 2013/14 at El Museo del Barrio, Garcia and OM collaborators are developing a new play about New York City's first immigrant - I am New York:
Juan Rodriguez. Tour director and choreographer of FELA! Garcia worked alongside
Bill T. Jones as Associate Choreographer to create the Tony award winning musical Off-Broadway, On Broadway, at the National Theater of London, and in Lagos Nigeria. Maija staged, directed & choreographed the US touring productions of FELA! in 2012 and 2013.Recent collaborations include the Fats Waller Dance Party with composers Jason Moran & Meshell N'degeocello at
Harlem Stage, The Kennedy Center, and San Francisco Jazz Festival. Film credits include Seun Kuti's music video RISE,
Angelique Kidjo's Move on Up and Kidjo's PBS Special. Garcia currently directs a theater arts program at A. Philip Randolph High School in Harlem and teaches Contemporary Jazz at the City College of New York and Steps on Broadway.
www.organicmagnetics.com