I am an actor, director, acting teacher and writer. My college education included two years at Bennington College and two years at New York University, where I graduated with a BFA in Dance/Drama. My teaching began in New York City 30 plus years ago at the Actors and Directors Lab, and I have taught almost continuously since then. Later, I moved to Sweden where I learned the language, taught theater, and toured with a children’s theater company for a year. When I returned to the US I joined the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble (BTE) in Bloomsburg, PA. There I continued to teach, perform and began directing. Plays I directed at BTE include: FOOLS RUSH IN, VOICE OF THE PRAIRIE, SEA MARKS, THE NEST, DAYTRIPS, THE BALTIMORE WALTZ, DEATH OF A SALESMAN and most recently THE EXPLORERS CLUB.
During my twelve years with BTE I acted in dozens of plays and served as Ensemble Director for three years. I was a site reporter for the National Endowment for the Arts for five years, and spent three years on the professional theatre companies panel. I traveled with BTE during a USIA tour of Kenya, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, and Namibia. The following year I returned to Zimbabwe for five weeks to adjudicate the National Theater Organization of Zimbabwe’s Theatre Festival and to teach workshops. I am still a proud associate member of BTE. In 2010 I co-founded WAM Theatre in the Berkshires with Kristen van Ginhoven, who is artistic director. – (wamtheatre.com).
Other plays directed at various regional theaters include CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD, ON THE VERGE, TONIGHT WE IMPROVISE, THE MYSTERY OF IRMA VEP and PRIVATE EYES. I co-wrote and directed BERWICK, AMERICA and THIS HOUSE BUILDED, both history plays commissioned by their communities. One man shows: HERE BE DRAGONS, co-written with Paul Outlaw; HEAVY METTLE and WORKING CLASS, both written and performed by Richard Hoehler.
I was an adjunct acting professor at SUNY Albany for 11 years and an artist in residence at Russell Sage College in Troy, New York for 10 years. There I created and directed two devised theater pieces: MIRROR MIRROR and “I’M NOT A FEMINIST, BUT….”; directed Jamuna Yvetter Sirker’s HELL AND HIGHWATER; adapted and directed THE TROJAN WOMEN which appeared at the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble’s First Stories Festival in NYC and the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers (2013), directed I NEVER SAW ANOTHER BUTTERFLY, SPRING AWAKENING and CABARET. I also performed Martha in WHOS AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF and Beth in TRIBES.
I have directed staged readings for WAM, The Rep in Albany, and The Berkshire Playwrights Lab.
“…I understood that the need to tell stories was deeply embedded in our minds and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination – and therefore fiction – was a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We processed the world by telling stories, produced human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves.”
-Aleksandar Hemon The Aquarium, Personal History, The New Yorker Magazine, June 13 & 20, 2011
