Who We Are – Sleeping Weazel

Board of Advisors

Directors

	CHARLOTTE MEEHAN, Artistic Director, is Playwright-in-Residence, Mary Heuser Chair in the Arts, and Co-Director of the Wheaton Institute for Interdisciplinary Humanities at Wheaton College (MA). Sleeping Weazel has premiered her multimedia plays, Cleanliness, Godliness, and Madness: A User’s Guide, Real Realism, and 27 Tips for Banishing the Blues. Previous stage works have been presented in Providence at Perishable Theatre, in Bristol (UK), and in New York at Dixon Place, the Flea Theater, La MaMa, Bleecker Street Theatre, and Pratt Institute, among others. She has been a resident artist in HERE Arts Center’s HARP program and Perishable Theatre’s RAPT program, was a 2008-09 Howard Foundation fellow in playwriting, and was awarded an Alpert/MacDowell Colony residency through the Herb Alpert Foundation. She holds MFAs in creative writing from Brown University and Brooklyn College.
	ADARA MEYERS, Managing Director, is an interdisciplinary writer. Her performance works and plays, Picture This, Birds, and Talk To At Me, premiered at Boston Center for the Arts (Sleeping Weazel), and her new music collaborations with composers Kirsten Volness and Leaha Maria Villarreal have premiered at Roulette and the L.A. Philharmonic. Other plays and interdisciplinary projects have been developed or produced at Salvage Vanguard Theater, Great Plains Theatre Conference, The Factory Theatre (Sleeping Weazel), and Perishable Theatre, among others. She is the recipient of a Rhode Island State Council on the Arts merit award for her play Tryouts and she has been a resident at Sedona Summer Colony. She holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College and a BA in English from Wheaton College (MA).
	AMANDA WEIR, Producing Director, is a playwright, director, puppeteer, and teacher who has written, directed, and produced plays in New York, Providence, Boston, and Cape Cod in both puppet and human form. Her plays have been presented at Perishable Theatre in Providence, HERE Arts Center in New York, and the Provincetown Theatre. She holds an MFA in Playwriting from Brooklyn College, where she studied with Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney, and a BA in Theatre Studies from Wheaton College (MA).

Affiliated Artists

	MARK BAUMER holds an MFA in Fiction from Brown University where he teaches a course called Everything is Fiction in the Continuing Education Program. Mark also hosts several websites including EveryDayYeah.com, and he recently transformed his fiction into a multimedia solo performance at Sleeping Weazel’s March 2012 event.
	STEVEN BELL is a videographer and video editor who studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. He makes short films, he records Sleeping Weazel events, and he has participated in the Rhode Island 48-Hour Film Festival.
	AMY LYNN BUDD is a theatre director, performer, and producer based in Providence. She is deeply commited to creating innovative works for the stage. She has directed regional and world premiere productions at Perishable Theatre, Brown University, Contemporary Theatre Company, NewGate Theatre, and others. Amy Lynn developed The Thing that Ate My Brain…Almost as a Resident Artist at Perishable Theatre (RAPTor) from 2006-09 and toured the work to Austin, TX and Washington, DC following production at Perishable. Miss Budd also collaborates with people age 6 and up to generate new theatre pieces in school and corporate settings.
	GLORIA CRIST has 25 years of professional acting, singing and directing for film and stage. Film/TV include Showtime’s Brotherhood, The Company Men, Missing William, and spokesperson for Fidelity Investments. Her stage roles include Maria Callas in Master Class (2nd Story Theatre), Cassiopeia in Biography of a Constellation, and “B” in Sweet Disaster, both at Perishable Theatre.
	STEPHANIE BURLINGTON DANIELS is a director, actor, and teacher. She is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Chair of the Theatre and Dance Studies Department at Wheaton College (MA). Her Wheaton College directing credits include Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, Tony Kushner’s Angels In America, Part One Millennium Approaches, and Anna Deavere Smith’s House Arrest. She has recently performed in Ken Prestininzi’s Birth, Breath, Bride, Elizabeth, Charlotte Meehan’s Sweet Disaster, Federico Garcia Lorca’s House of Bernarda Alba, and a 1950s version of Twelfth Night.
	ERIK EHN is Head of Writing for Performance at Brown University. Among his more than 80 plays are: The Saint Plays, Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling, Maria Kizito, No Time Like the Present, Wolf at the Door, Tailings, Beginner, Ideas of Good and Evil, and an adaptation of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. He is an artistic associate at San Francisco’s Theatre of Yugen, for whom he recently wrote and directed a cycle of six new noh plays, performed once, over the course of a day. His works have been produced in San Francisco (Intersection, Thick Description, Yugen), Seattle (Annex, Empty Space), Austin (Frontera), New York (BACA, Whitney Museum), San Diego (Sledgehammer), Chicago (Red Moon), Atlanta (7 Stages), Los Angeles (Cal Rep, Museum of Jurassic Technology), Belgrade (Dah); elsewhere. He produces the Arts in the One World conference yearly, which engages themes of art and social change.
	CHRISTINE EVANS’ production highlights include Trojan Barbie (American Repertory Theatre and Playbox Theatre, U.K.), Slow Falling Bird (Crowded Fire), Weightless, Mothergun and All Souls’ Day (Perishable Theatre); and My Vicious Angel (Belvoir St. Theatre and The Adelaide International Festival of the Arts). Samuel French, Smith and Kraus, Theater Forum and NoPassport Press have published her work. Honors include a Rockefeller Bellagio Award, a Fulbright Award, the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award and the RISCA Playwriting Award. Evans is a Resident Artist at HERE (NY), holds an MFA and PhD from Brown and joins the Georgetown Department of Performing Arts in 2012.
	KELI GARRETT is a recipient of a 2011 McKnight Fellowship, and has had her plays and adaptations produced and developed at Dixon Place in NYC, Zoo District in L.A., Penumbra Theatre, the LAByrinth, New York Theatre Workshop, Playwrights Horizons, Rites and Reason Theatre, Victory Gardens, City Lit Theater, Chicago Theater Company, Organic Theater, and the California College of Arts and Crafts. The Rhode Island Arts Council, The Joyce Foundation, City Lit Theater and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum have commissioned her work. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University, was a Beinecke Foundation fellow, and has a BA in Theatre from Columbia College.
	JESS FOSTER is a playwright, dramaturg, and teacher whose plays have been presented in New York, Providence, Boston, Washington DC, and Iowa. She holds an MFA from University of Iowa’s Playwrights’ Workshop and a BA in English from Wheaton College (MA). She teaches Playwriting at Interlochen Summer Arts Camp and English courses at Wentworth Institute of Technology. She also works as an Outreach Coordinator for Company One.
	VANESSA GILBERT is a collaborative theatre artist based in Providence, RI. She produces and directs theatrical works of varying scales, from miniature puppet theatre to multi-day performance festivals and opera. In 17 years with Perishable Theatre, Vanessa directed and produced scores of plays and events and founded both Blood from a Turnip—RI’s only late night puppet salon—and the Resident Artist at Perishable Theatre program. She is a proud member of the Magdalena Project, an international network for women in contemporary theatre for which she instigated Magdalena USA, to date the only Magdalena Project event in the USA.
	MAGDALENA GÓMEZ has been a performance poet since the early 70’s. Her first performance at age 17 included an audience of naked men draped in hot pink fishing nets at the former Dramatis Personae Theater in Greenwich Village, home to Steven Baker’s Boys! Boys! Boys! All Male Revue. Magdalena is the Co-founder and Artistic Director of Teatro V!da and the co-editor of Bullying: Replies, Rebuttals, Confessions, and Catharsis (Skyhorse Publishing, NYC) the first intergenerational, multicultural and multi-genre anthology on the subject of bullying written by those who have lived it.
	DAVID HIGGINS writes words for people and puppets. When not collaborating with puppets and people in the service of his words, he serves the words of others. He is co-curator of Blood From a Turnip, a late night puppet salon, and has worked on several projects with human performers, most notably as the producer of the BarPlays Festival.
	JEFFREY M. JONES is a playwright whose works include 70 Scenes of Halloween, Nightcoil, Der Inka Von Peru, Tomorrowland, a series of Crazy Plays, Write If You Get Work, and J.P. Morgan Saves the Nation, a musical with a score by the late Jonathan Larson, directed by Jean Randich. He has been manager of The Wooster Group, Richard Foreman and John Jesurun; taught playwriting at the Yale School of Drama and a series of Pataphysics workshops at the Flea Theater; and is currently co-curator of the OBIE-winning Little Theatre series at Dixon Place.
	HOLLY LAWS is interested in a multidisciplinary approach to art. Laws’ first love, sculpture, draws heavily on her work in theatre and puppetry. Her recent sculptural installation Axis Mundi: Levittown, incorporates objects, projected video, and recorded dialogue. Her work is exhibited nationally and is in numerous private collections. Laws holds a BFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University, and an MFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. She teaches art at the University of Central Arkansas, and has seven pet chickens.
	JU-PONG LIN, an educator, communitarian, artist, and maker of stories, fuses video, performance, installation art, needle-crafts and community storytelling. Her art crosses cultural fences and links environmental justice with spiritual practice, interdisciplinary art with scrubbing jam off the kitchen floor. Her current work knits communities together through stories of changing neighborhoods. She has exhibited her work nationally, including Women in the Director’s Chair, the Walker Museum of Art, New York’s Mix festival, and the Tacoma Art Museum. Ju-Pong teaches in the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College and collaborates with the Round the Corner Movers dance company.
	JAKE MAHAFFY’s experimental shorts and low-budget, feature-length films War and Wellness have screened in festivals and competitions around the world including Sundance (2004/05/08/09) and Rotterdam (2004/06/08). He studied filmmaking at RISD and the Russian State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, co-founded ‘Handcranked Film Projects’ in Boston, and has established a film program at Wheaton College (MA). For Free in Deed, an upcoming feature film about a man who tries to perform a miracle and fails, Mahaffy was twice nominated for the Sundance/NHK award, named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s ‘new faces of independent film’ and has received a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital grant, a LEF grant, and the Sundance Institute’s inaugural Auerbach Screenwriting Fellowship after developing the project at the 2006 Sundance Filmmaker’s Labs.
	NADIA MAHDI is a director, musician and theatre maker who has worked in numerous experimental and ensemble-based productions. She has appeared at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Classic Stage Company, La MaMa E.T.C., PS122, HERE Arts Center, and the Robert Wilson Watermill Center. She is currently on the faculty at Georgetown University in Washington, DC where she has directed for the university mainstage season and acted with such companies as Theater Alliance and Roundhouse Theater. She received her MA in the Department of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley.
	RICK MASSIMO is a playwright, musician, and music critic for the Providence Journal. He has been a resident artist in Perishable Theatre’s RAPT program, has taught playwriting at Perishable Theatre, and holds an MFA in playwriting from Brandeis University. In his spare time, Rick plays serious chess.
	KYM MOORE is a multidisciplinary stage director, writer and producer. She has directed plays off-Broadway and in regional theatres including Soho Rep, La MaMa E.T.C., New Dramatists, Penumbra Theatre, Here Arts Center, The Women’s Project, Boston Center for the Arts, Urban Stages, CAP 21, The Workshop Theatre, and StageWest. Recent directing projects include: Yermedea by Erik Ehn, 20/20: the musical by Andy Hertz, and Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde by Moises Kaufman. She is an associate member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, an alumna of the Lincoln Center Theater Director’s Lab, and a faculty member in Brown University’s Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies.
	ELISE MORRISON has been performing in the Providence area since 2004. She has performed a number of surveillance art pieces on the public thoroughfares of NYC, Providence and the INTERNET, created the live performance events Cabaret Murderess (2007) and Mirror Stage (2008), co-produced Brown’s late night cabaret, Smoke and Mirrors (2008-10), and performed in shows at Brown and Perishable Theatre (where she was also a Resident Artist), including Sweet Disaster (2008), Biography of a Constellation (2008), Anna Bella Eema (2009), Fracture/Mechanics (2009), and the burlesque cabaret Jingle Belles and a Few Balls (2009, 2010). Having finally finished her doctorate in Theatre and Performance Studies at Brown University, she has recently moved to Boston to teach Speech and Communication at Harvard.
	CLINTON O’DELL is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Wheaton College. Clinton teaches design for the stage at the introductory and intermediate levels, and also manages the costume shop. Clinton has worked as a designer, draper, scene painter, crafts person, and costumer in theatre and film from Maine to California. In addition to his theatrical work, Clinton is working on two long-standing series of mixed media paintings; one introspective set multi-perspective portraits, and another which chronicles the escapades of Ozpeg, a fictitious but very-much-alive pink Peeps bunny.
	KEN PRESTININZI, Associate Chair of Playwriting at the Yale School of Drama and artistic director of the Brown/Trinity Playwrights Repertory Theatre, has written and directed new plays across the country and internationally. His play Beholder received a Joseph Jefferon Award and he has received theatre awards from the American College Theatre Festival, California Arts Council, Djerassi Program, Gerbode Foundation, Goethe Institute, LEF, Millay Arts Colony, National Endowment of the Humanities, Rockerfeller Foundation and the San Francisco Cultural Equity Office. He has been resident artist at Perishable Theatre, artistic director of West Coast Playwrights and treasurer of Performance Studies international.
	PATRICK RASHLEIGH is a New Media designer. He received his MA in Musicology from York University in Toronto and his BA in English at the University of British Columbia. He is currently the Faculty Technology Liaison for the Humanities at Wheaton College in Massachusetts.
	JACOB RICHMAN is a mixed-media composer whose work explorers the relationship between sight and sound in both live performance and fixed media. He is fascinated by what he sees as the interconnectedness of things: people with places, sounds with textures, humans with animals, plants and the natural world. He feels that exploring the relationships between sounds and images in performance is an effective way to both investigate and convey these greater connections that surround us. Jacob lives in Providence, RI and is a doctoral candidate in the MEME program at Brown University.
	GEORGE EMILIO SANCHEZ is the Chairperson of the Department of Performing and Creative Arts at CUNY Staten Island. He teaches undergraduate courses in the Drama program and graduate courses for the Education Department. He has directed six original student productions for the PCA and continues to work with students and classes with the goal of creating original theater/performance works. He directs Emergenyc, the performance project for young “artivists” under the Hemispheric Institute umbrella, and travels nationally and internationally to facilitate workshops on Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed techniques. A writer, performer, and director, George has performed his most recent solo work, Buried Up To My Neck While Thinking Outside The Box, at Dixon Place, La MaMa, and Wheaton College (MA).
	LISA SCHLESINGER is a playwright and writer and the Playwriting Coordinator for Columbia College Chicago. She has received commissions from the BBC, the Guthrie Theatre, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Portland Stage Company and UNESCO City of Literature among others. She is a recipient of the NEA/TCG Playwrights Residency Award and winner of the BBC International Playwriting Award and has received grants and awards from the NEA, CEC Artslink International, the Bush Foundation, among others. She received her MFAs from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Iowa Playwrights’ Workshop.
	DOMINIC TAYLOR is Associate Artistic Director of Penumbra Theatre Company, and Assistant Professor of Theatre at University of Minnesota. Directing Projects have included, Fresh Faust, The Negroes Burial Ground, Uppa Creek, Destiny, Ride the Rhythm, The Wiz, Night Train to Bolina, Execution of Justice, and Black Nativity. Author of Wedding Dance, Personal History, Upcity Service(s) and I Wish You Love, among other plays. He is a Board Member for The Givens Foundation for African-American Literature. He is an alumnus of New Dramatists. He holds his BA and MFA from Brown University.
	KIRSTEN VOLNESS is a composer and pianist who works and teaches privately in Providence, RI. When not writing electro/acoustic music, she collaborates with Awesome Collective on multimedia performances, writes and performs operas with whose who have experienced homelessness, is pianist for NYC -based Hotel Elefant, and works to promote new music and art in New England and beyond. She holds composition degrees from the Universities of Michigan (DMA, MM) and Minnesota (BA, summa cum laude) and serves as Director of Publicity and Marketing for The Boston New Music Initiative.
	RILEY WAGGAMAN used to in live in Washington, DC, where he wrote about politics for web logs and newspapers. Vanity Fair once proclaimed him “America’s most trusted cub reporter.” Riley is an occasional contributor to Huffington Post College, and now teaches English in primary schools around Southern Moravia. He is passionate about the “Occupy” movement (he spent the better part of two weeks camping in Zuccotti Park), interpretive dance, and piano improvisation.
	CRAIG WATSON is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Sleepwalking with Orpheus (Shearsman Books, 2011) and Secret Histories (Burning Deck, 2007). He has worked in the performing arts at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, corporate arts, literary arts, and emergency services, among other oddly chosen vocations.
	VERONICA ANASTASIO WISEMAN is an actress, educator and television producer. Currently, her work focuses on building community collaborations to create performance and production opportunities for youth on local stages and cable access channels.

Board of Advisors

Directors

Affiliated Artists

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