Faye Price, Co-Artistic Director
Faye has served as the co-producer of PHT mainstage productions since 2000. As an actress, she most recently appeared in the PHT productions of The Story, Bel Canto, Boesman and Lena and [sic] and served as co-director of the PHT production of Mr. Bundy. From 1995 through 1999, she served as dramaturg for the Guthrie Theater working on over a dozen productions including Crowns directed by Tim Bond, Summer and Smoke directed by David Esbjornson, The Magic Fire directed by Libby Appel, and Thunder Knocking on the Door, directed by Marion McClinton. As an actor, Faye has worked extensively at the Guthrie Theater, Penumbra, Mixed Blood Theater, and Illusion Theater. Nationally, some of the many stages on which Faye has appeared include: Circle in the Square in NYC, Center Stage in Baltimore, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Faye is an alumnus of the Salzburg Seminar. She has also served as a panelist for the McKnight Fellowships for Theater Artists and as a literary reviewer for the NEA/TCG Theater Residency Program for Playwrights in 1997. Awarded the August Wilson Fellowship to study Dramaturgy and Literary Criticism, Faye received her graduate degree from the University of Minnesota.
612-787-3621
pricef@pillsburyhousetheatre.org
Noël Raymond, Co-Artistic Director
Noël has helped make theatre for over 13 years. She holds an MFA in Acting from the University of Minnesota and a BFA from Ithaca College in New York. Noël currently serves on the Boards of Directors of the Multicultural Development Center and the Burning House Group Theatre Company which she co-founded in 1993. She is also a company member of Carlyle Brown and Company. She has taught acting classes and theatre movement in multiple settings to children, college students and adults with developmental disabilities. She is an Equity actor who has performed with Pillsbury House Theatre, the Burning House Group, the Guthrie Theater, Penumbra Theatre, Bryant Lake Bowl, and Minnesota Festival Theatres in Minnesota as well as the Hangar Theatre in New York. Noël’s directing credits include Underneath the Lintel, An Almost Holy Picture, Far Away, Angels in America: Parts I and II, and [sic] at Pillsbury House Theatre, From Shadows to Light at Theatre Mu, The BI Show with MaMa mOsAiC, and multiple staged readings and workshops through the Playwrights’ Center, among others. Noël has served on numerous panels including TCG/American Theatre, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Playwright’s Center and United Arts to name a few.
612-787-3620
raymondn@pillsburyhousetheatre.org
Alan Berks, Director of Communications
Alan M. Berks is the author of nine full-length plays, seven one-acts, and numerous short plays and monologues that have been seen in Minneapolis, Chicago, San Francisco, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Indianapolis, and New York. Awards include: Minnesota State Arts Board (Ringtone), MacDowell Colony Fellow (They Want), and Jerome Fellow (Mourning Rituals). As a marketing and public relations consultant, he has worked for the History Theatre, Mixed Blood Theatre, Mu Performing Arts, Great River Shakespeare Festival, and Burning House Group as well as the Lawlor Group, Succeed Consulting, and more. He also co-created Thirst Theater and MinnesotaPlaylist.com.
612-787-3622
berksa@pillsburyhousetheatre.org
Corrie Zoll, Development Manager
Before becoming part of the Pillsbury House community in 2011, Corrie served on the Minneapolis Arts Commission and as a board member of Bedlam Theatre and Franklin Artworks. Corrie is a graduate of Grinnell College as well as the National Theatre Institute, and expects to complete a Masters Degree in Arts and Cultural Management from Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota in 2013.
612-787-3642
zollc@pillsburyhousetheatre.org
Elizabeth R. MacNally, Production Manager
Elizabeth has been a freelance stage manager in the Twin Cities for over 10 years. As a stage manager she has worked with Pillsbury House Theatre, History Theatre, Jungle Theater, Mixed Blood Theatre, The Guthrie Theater, Penumbra Theatre, as well as others. In 2011 she took became the production manager of Pillsbury House Theatre. Elizabeth is a proud member of Actors Equity Association and holds a BFA in Theatre Production from Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois.
612-787-3634
macnallye@pillsburyhousetheatre.org
James A. Williams, Director of Teen Programming
Nationally, Williams has an extensive performing history with Centerstage, The Goodman, Mark Taper Forum, The McCarter, Seattle Rep and Yale Rep culminating on Broadway in August Wilson’s Radio Golf. Williams performed multiple roles in the Kennedy Center’s August Wilson’s Century Cycle in 2008 and Off-Broadway in Jitney and Marion Clinton’s Walkers. He has served as Co-director and acting coach for Seeds of Change program in St Paul, MN and is Artistic Director of the Hennepin County Home School Theatre Project. He has led performance workshops at Brown University, Colby College, Macalester College, University of Minnesota, the International School of Kenya, Nshupu School, Tanzania and Penumbra Theatre Summer Institute. A founding company member of Penumbra Theatre, in 2001, Williams was awarded the St. Paul Companies Leadership Initiative in the Neighborhoods Grant, a 2005 NAACP Image Award Nominee. He was named Actor of the Year by City Pages magazine (2003). In 2008 he received an Ivey Award for performance excellence and was named 2008 Artist of the Year by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He is TCG New Generations Leadership fellow
612-787-3626
williamsja@pillsburyhousetheatre.org
Ellen Fenster, Director of Chicago Avenue Project
Ellen Fenster has been with Pillsbury House Theater since 2001, working as a Breaking Ice actor and director, teaching artist and main stage assistant director. She is currently the director of PH+T’s Chicago Avenue Project. Ellen has been an artistic associate with the Illusion theater for the last ten years where she curates the annual Lights Up! Series, a presentation of new work by young and emerging artists. Recent directing credits include Sea Marks and Burn This with Gremlin theater and Proof with the Phoenix Theater Project. Ellen enjoys her work as a teaching artist around the Twin Cities, she is currently the director of the South High Theater Program. Other recent education projects include directing Our Town at St. Paul Conservatory for Performing Arts and choreographing West Side Story at theater e3, a summer theater institute for children where Ellen has served as the creative movement teacher and choreographer on 11 musicals. Ellen feels honored and blessed to work with the people at PH+T and considers it her artistic home.
612-787-3624
fenstere@pillsburyhousetheatre.org
Kurt Kwan, Artistic Programs Associate
Kurt Kwan has been creating performances and facilitating dialogues around issues of Diversity and Inclusion with the Breaking Ice company since 2001. He also manages the Late Nite and Naked Stages programs. As an actor he has performed with Ten Thousand Things, The Walker, Childrens Theatre Company, Mu Performing Arts, New York Asian American Writers, The History Theatre, and Theatre La Homme Dieu.
612-787-3623
kwank@pillsburyhousetheatre.org
Kelsye Gould, Marketing Assistant
Kelsye A. Gould has been helping businesses and nonprofit organizations communicate ideas both visually and through the written word since graduating from St. Catherine University in 2010. As a freelance graphic designer and marketing communications consultant, she collaborates with a number of organizations, doing everything from print and web design to writing and implementing marketing plans. In addition to Pillsbury House + Theatre, Kelsye has worked with Actors Theater of Minnesota, BioBusiness Alliance of Minnesota, Concrete and Grass Lowertown Music Festival, MinnesotaPlaylist.com, Saint Paul Riverfront Corporation, and Teatro del Pueblo, to name a few.
612-787-3622
gouldk@pillsburyhousetheatre.org
Mike Hoyt, Arts on Chicago Community Liaison
Mike has dedicated his career to enriching the lives of young people through the arts while generating value for artists and their work within our communities and cultures. He is a practicing professional artist who produces participatory public art projects as well as exhibits artwork locally, nationally, and abroad. He works to establish new and unique methodologies that push boundaries for what, why, and how art engages diverse public participants while challenging the conventional role of art and the social role of artists in contemporary culture. Hoyt has received fellowships from the MN State Arts Board and is currently an Art(ist) On the Verge Jerome Fellow through Northern.Lights.MN, working experimentally at the intersection of ar t, technology, and digital culture.
612-787-3655
mike@pillsburyhouseandtheatre.org
Molly Van Avery, Director of Naked Stages
Molly Van Avery is an artist and arts advocate. Her performance work has been shown at Bedlam Theatre, Open Eye Figure Theatre, Bryant Lake Bowl Theater and the Walker Arts Center. She has received the MN State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant, the Blacklock Nature Sanctuary Grant, the Jerome Travel and Study Grant, and the Naked Stages Grant for emerging performance artists. She is currently completing an MFA in Creative Writing at Hamline University. As an art maker, Molly creates performances that weave together her personal history with broader social themes to inspire both introspection and action in her audiences. As an arts advocate, Molly is committed to making spaces that support the development of emerging artists. Molly believes that creativity is a powerful catalyst for transformation within schools, neighborhoods, institutions and artists themselves which is why she is honored to be a part of the work of Pillsbury House Theatre.
e.g. bailey, Late Nite Series Curator
Multidisciplinary artist, e.g. bailey, is an award winning spoken word artist, poet, theatre artist, filmmaker, and producer. He recently released his debut album, American Afrikan, which debuted on the CMJ Hip Hop Charts. He is currently Assistant Directing The Brothers Size, for director Marion McClinton, presented by Pillsbury House Theatre and the Mount Curve Company, at the Guthrie in September 2012. e.g. can be heard on Verbal Graffiti Radio, a hip hop and spoken word radio show, on Sunday nights at 10:30pm, on KFAI Fresh Air Radio (www.kfai.org).
www.egbailey.com • egbailey.bandcamp.com • facebook.com/egbaileyartist • twitter.com/egbailey’
Laurie Smith Carlos, Naked Stages and Late Nite Series Curator
Laurie Carlos is a dynamic, OBIE Award-winning actress, who created the role of Lady In Blue in Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf; an inventive, two-time Bessie Award-winning choreographer (for White Chocolate and Heat) whose work with the Urban Bush Women is the stuff of performance legend and a unique director, who has helmed the premieres of new work by award-winning writers Sharon Bridgforth, Carl Hancock Rux, Lourdes Perez, Suzan-Lori Parks, Zell Miller lll and Daniel Alexander Jones. Laurie has received grants and awards from NYFA, NEA, and TCG. She is a 2004 Bush Fellow, curator for Naked Stages and Non-English Speaking Spoken Here: The Late Nite Series at Pillsbury House Theatre and has served on the Jerome Foundation Board for nine years.
Anton Jones, Resident Artist
Anton’s mission is to Change the Face of the American Theatre audience. As an interdisciplinary theatre artist, Anton Jones has devoted his career to fusing his experience as a playwright, director, theatre educator, composer/sound designer, and dramaturg into his own unique approach to the creation of live performance. For the past 6 years, he has worked with theatres like the Guthrie, Pillsbury House Theatre, Pangaea World Theatre, The Illusion Theatre, and History Theatre. In 2006 he received the Playwright’s Center/Jerome Foundation Many Voices Residency where he developed The FUNeral, a fusion of Hip-Hop Theatre and Commedia Dell’Arte.
612-787-3637
Email
Masanari Kawahara, Resident Artist
Masanari Kawahara is a performer, designer and educator who incorporates puppetry, mask, and movement into his work. He was a company member of In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre (HOBT) from 1998 to 2009. His last production as a company member, A Path Home: A Story of Thich Nhat Hanh (2009) which was chosen as outstanding puppetry by Lavender. He was the co-creator and designer of GOTAMA: Journey to the Buddha (2006), recognized by City Pages as one of the ten great sets/scenic designs of the year. Currently he is working on HIROSHIMA (work-in-progress) to be presented by Pangea World Theater for spring of 2013. He is a Playwrights’ Center McKnight Theater Artist Fellow (2010-2011).
612-787-3647
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Angela Olson, Resident Artist
Angela Olson has been living and working in the Twin Cities for the past six years. As a Minnesota native, working within and for her community has become very important to her. She participated in Northern Spark last year with wanderlust, a suitcase show with projection and motorized shadow puppets. She has worked as a puppet-maker in the community with Open Eye Figure Theatre and In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre. Last summer she toured small communities in and around the metro area with a group of artists performing her show balloon balloon balloon, balloon balloon, an interactive, bicycle-towed puppet show for children, funded by the Jim Henson Foundation. Her show my beloved had turned and was gone was performed in early February 2011 as part of Heart of the Beast’s Jerome-funded PuppetLAB. Based on a collection of work by Charles Bukowski, my beloved combined live acting, puppetry, and live music to create an immersive environment for audience members. Currently, she is working on a series of canta historia shadow shows, teaching puppetry after school with Pillsbury House Theatre, and continuously working towards art making that is important and accessible to the community she lives in.
612-787-3647
Email
Pramila Vasudevan, Resident Artist
Trained in Indian dance and visual media, Pramila Vasudevan has been teaching the art of performance from and dance and media perspective at Pillsbury House Theatre since 2010. She is the founder and artistic director of Aniccha Arts where she uses dance and electronic media to create immersive performance environments that interrupt public spaces and invoke mass response. Highlights of her work include Dousing the Mirage (2007), presented by Center for Independent Artists; an excerpt of The Wet Bug Hush (2008), featured in the Choreographers’ Evening at the Walker Art Center; The Weather Vein Project (2009), a part of the Artists on the Verge fellowship at the Weisman Art Museum; and Words to Dead Lips (2010) of the Catalyst Series at Intermedia Arts, and In Habit: Living Patterns at the 2012 Northern Spark Festival. Major influences include Dr. Ananya Chatterjea, Ranee Ramaswamy, Dr. Balanandakumar, Piotr Szyhalski, Ali Momeni, and Dipankar Mukherjee.
612-787-3647
Email
Antoine Duke, Resident Teaching Artist
As a artist, performer, poet, educator, spoken word artist, dancer, and director, Antoine Duke is indeed a man of many hats. He currently works for Pillsbury House Theater as a Resident Teaching Artist.
As a young performer and teaching artist, Antoine has received grants, founded companies, and competed nationally as a spoken word artist. The most recent grant he received was the VERVE grant in 2012, in which he was awarded over three thousand dollars to create a one-man show entitled RAGS. He has also founded No Projection, a company that teaches literacy through spoken word and social justice theater; Shaking Fences Hip Hop Dance class; Gages Photography; and Dopeimgeclothing.
He chooses social justice education through theater and art because he believes that art cannot only teach creative and powerful practices, but also because it can educate us on how to become better human beings. “Art allows you to listen to the world around you and to take in other perspectives, which is not easily done, especially in today’s society.”
Antoine got his start in the performing arts the first time he saw Michael Jackson on “Motown 25th: Yesterday, Today, Forever: March 25th, 1983.” As he watched through his television in his living room, he was hooked to dancing,creating and performing anywhere he could. Since then, he has attended conferences and performed in Los Angels , San Francisco, Detroit, Washington D.C. , New York, Arkansas, and Minnesota. He has gone on to teach spoken word and theater in schools (Washburn and Brooklyn Center High), and he Founded “8 Stages,” a program at Pillsbury House Theater in which theater and spoken word teach youth how to unlearn and prevent the culture of violence. He aspires to found his own organization, “Urban Speaks,” which will teach spoken word and social justice theater to youth around the Twin Cites.
ASSOCIATE COMPANY MEMBERS
Jamila Anderson, Clare Brauch, Laurie Smith Carlos, John Catron, Christiana Clark, Paul de Cordova, Stephen DiMenna, Brian Goranson, Signe Harriday, Daniel Alexander Jones, Jodi Kellogg, Blayn Lemke, Marion McClinton, Kimberly Joy Morgan, Sonja Parks, Heidi Batz Rogers, Michael Wangen, James A. Williams, Payton J. WoodsonFOUNDER
Ralph RemingtonADVISORY BOARD
Norah Shapiro, Chair; Cordelia Anderson; Pamela Arnold; Melodie Bahan; John Humleker; Jim Langemo; Sarah Milligan-Toffler; Eric Mueller; Julie Sand; Anthony R. Wagner; Nedy Windham
