Marella Martin Koch

Marella Martin Koch, writer-director, is the founder of The Rally Cat. She was previously the associate to Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Haskell Wexler, as well as the managing editor of SDC Journal, a quarterly publication celebrating the crafts of stage directing and choreography. She earned a B.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from U.C. Berkeley and an M.F.A. from the NYU/Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. She is the librettist of Marianne Dashwood, Songs of Love & Misery with music by 2018 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awardee Aferdian Stephens. First premiered at UCLA's Herb Alpert School of Music, Marianne Dashwood has since been presented at Yale School of Music and the SUNY Plattsburgh Jane Austen & The Arts Conference and was commissioned by mezzo-soprano Meagan Martin, winner of the 2018 Hershey Felder Competition for Classical Musicians. Her short operas include I Celebrate for "Park and Bark" with American Opera Projects and the NYU/Tisch Opera Lab and Ten Minutes in the Life or Death of... (music by TJ Rubin). Her short musical How Love Feels (music by Jonathan Fadner) has been presented by Barrington Stage Company, Common Man Musicals, and National Asian Artists' Project. Full-length projects in development include Sense & Sensibility with Aferdian Stephens, Adam & Eve with Minhui Lee, and Danny & The Rocket with Casey O'Neil, which was developed in part at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley's 2017 Writers' Retreat and has received readings and workshops at the Pocono Mountains Music Festival and Tisch New Musical Theatre Workshop. In addition, she has directed readings, concerts, productions, and happenings throughout Los Angeles and New York.