Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities Robert and Ruth Halperin University Fellow for Undergraduate Education Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts Chair, Department of Drama
The Ann O’Day Maples Chair in the Arts and Professor of Drama and English, Twentieth-Century Performance, queer and feminist theory, twentieth-century dance and visual art
Patrick Anderson Visiting Assistant Professor (2007-2008)
Patrick Anderson is a visiting assistant professor at Stanford during the 2007-2008 academic year. His regular appointment is as an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at UC-San Diego, where he is also affiliated with the Ethnic Studies Department and the Critical Gender Studies Program. Anderson works at the intersection of performance studies and cultural studies. His background includes training and experience in theater and dance, film, cultural studies, queer and gender studies, ethnic studies, political geography, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. He is currently completing two books. The first (So Much Wasted) explores the cultural and political implications of three forms self-starvation: anorexia nervosa, staged fasting, and hunger strikes. The second (Violence Performed) is an edited anthology of transnational studies of violence from scholars working in performance studies and visual culture. Recent writing has appeared in Cultural Studies, The Radical History Review, and TDR. He holds a PhD in Performance Studies (with a designated emphasis in women, gender, and sexuality) from Berkeley.
Jean-Marie Apostolidès Professor, classical and contemporary French theater
Jean-Marie Apostolidès has been teaching in the Department of Drama since 1993. As a playwright, his texts have been produced in France, Canada, and the United States. Over the last twelve years, he has staged a dozen plays at Stanford and in the Bay Area, both classical and contemporary, particularly from the European repertoire. In his productions, he has focused on the notion of “mise-en-tableaux,” which complements the traditional techniques of mise-en-scène with silent tableaux aimed at visually translating the “unconscious” of the text analyzed from a theoretical perspective.
Among his books are: Le roi-machine (1981), La nauf des fous (1982), Les métamorphoses de Tintin (1984/2003/2006), Le Prince sacrifié (1985), L’affaire Unabomber (1996), Les tombeaux de Guy Debord (1999/2006), L’audience (2001), Traces, revers, écart (2001), Héroïsme et victimisation (2003), Sade in the Abyss (2003), Tintin et le mythe du surenfant (2003), Cyrano, qui fut tout et qui ne fut rien (2006), Il faut construire l’hacienda (2006), Ivan Chtcheglov, profil perdu (2006), Une volée de Moineaux (2007), in collaboration with Boris Donné for the last two volumes. Also with Boris Donné, he has edited unknown texts related to the Letterist and the Situationist movements by authors such as Patrick Straram (three volumes) and Ivan Chtcheglov (one volume).
Apostolidès has also participated in collective volumes such as L’Archipel Tintin (2004) or Little Nemo, un siècle de rêves (2005). In cinema, he has recently completed a long feature film with Bertrand Renaudineau, Buvons, buvons et moquons-nous du reste (Gallix Productions, Paris, 2005). The film was selected for the Festival des Indépendants, Lyon, 2006.
Maya Arad Lecturer, drama
Maya Arad is a Hebrew author and playwright. She is often considered to be the foremost exponent of a recent Israeli literary movement characterized by tight formalism and rich intertextual detail. Among her books are the award-winning, best-selling novel in verse, Another Place, a Foreign City (2003), now a hit musical at the Cameri Theater, Tel Aviv; The Righteous Forsaken (2005), a comedy in verse inspired by Griboedov’s Woe from Wit; Seven Moral Failings, a novel (2006); and Roots and Patterns: Hebrew Morpho-Syntax (2005). She earned her BA in Classics and Linguistics at Tel Aviv University (1994), her PhD in Linguistics at University College, London (1998), and she also spent long periods studying in Moscow. She has taught in Geneva, at Harvard, and in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Jeffrey Bihr Lecturer, drama
Jeffrey Bihr has worked as an actor, director, composer and educator for the last twenty-five years. He was a company member for seven seasons at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre and has been a member of the International Acting Company of Tadashi Suzuki since 1987. He was a founding member of Anne Bogart’s SITI company, and has spent seven years on the core faculty of the MFA Program at ACT. Recently, Bihr directed The Lover at Stanford, Gown for his Mistress, a Feydeau farce, and Deep Sea Diving in Los Angeles. Other credits include The Misanthrope in Münster, Germany, and The Greeks in London. In addition, he has composed numerous play and film scores. Bihr has won numerous awards including Bay Area Critics Circle and Dramalogue awards for acting and directing, and CINDY award for film composition.
Alice-Louise Bonaker Production Support Technician
Alice-Louise Bonaker has a degree in Drama Design from Stanford. She has worked as a freelance technician and designer in the Bay Area and in theatrical lighting rentals and production in the Midwest.
Susan Applewood Cann Office Manager, Dance Division
Susan Applewood Cann is the Office Manager and graphic designer for the Dance Division. Her past experience includes working as an editor in a newsroom in the Watergate era; processing secret security clearances for the Department of Defense; selling real estate in North Bend, Washington (of “Twin Peaks” fame); proofreading an x-rated literary journal; owning a children’s resale clothing store in Berkeley; and self-publishing a guidebook she wrote for families in Santa Barbara.
Susan Cashion Senior Lecturer, Mexican dance, Latin American dance
Susan Cashion received her PhD in Education (Stanford University, 1983), MA in Anthropology (Stanford University, 1982), and MA in Dance (UCLA, 1967). She joined the Dance faculty in 1972 and is a teacher of dance anthropology, modern dance, Mexican dance, and Latin American dance forms at Stanford.
Cashion was the Coordinator of the Dance Division from June 1987 to September 2002. She was the recipient of two Fulbright grants (one to Mexico and one to Chile), an American Association of University Women Fellowship, and received recognition from the Mexican government for contributions to Mexican culture and folklore in the United States. Cashion is the former President of the California Dance Educators Association, member of the Board of Directors for Congress on Research in Dance, and Artistic Director of the Grupo Folklórico Los Lupeños de San Jose.
Ron Davies Drama Department Administrator
Ron Davies is the Administrator of the Department of Drama, a position he has held since May 1988. In addition to a BA from Dartmouth, and a MA from Catholic University, he completed a PhD from the Department of Drama in 1986.
Alison Duxbury Production Stage Manager; Lecturer
Alison Duxbury graduated from Stanford in 1995 with a BA in History and Drama (with an emphasis in Stage Management). After graduation she worked for The California Theatre Center as a stage manager and toured the United States with various young audience productions. She returned to school in 1996 attending the stage management and technical theater course at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. While in London she worked as an assistant stage manager for Opera Holland Park and did lighting and sound work at The Place Theater and The Royal National Theatre. In the United States she has stage managed for The Centennial Theatre Festival in Connecticut and TheatreWorks in Palo Alto. She teaches stage management, sound design and production processes for the Department of Drama.
William Eddelman Associate Professor Emeritus
William Eddelman has been a set and costume designer and a theater historian for more than forty years. At Stanford he has taught a wide variety of classes which have ranged from design, theater aesthetics, and musical theater to dramatic literature and cultural studies. This last school year he taught a graduate seminar in international theater aesthetics and this coming fall he will continue teaching an undergraduate seminar called “Mapping and Wrapping the Body: The Psychology of Clothes.” He has taught several classes for Stanford Continuing Studies and in the last two quarters he has given classes on Venice and the Veneto and Paris in the Jazz Age. Last fall he co-led a tour for Stanford Alumni Travel in the Veneto part of Italy with a focus on Palladian Villas, and this February he will lead a tour to Venice for carnival.
As a very active board member of the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum (which will be known in the future as the Museum of Performance and Design), Eddelman is involved in advising and buying materials for the new museum. He continues to work on a massive postcard collection that focuses on the history of costume, and is structuring a documentation project on the history of the costume and set design work at the Prague Quadrennials. Recently he completed a volume of photographs from nearly forty years ago.
Harry J. Elam, Jr. Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities Robert and Ruth Halperin University Fellow for Undergraduate Education Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts Chair, Department of Drama
Harry J. Elam, Jr. is the Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities, the Robert and Ruth Halperin University Fellow for Undergraduate Education, and Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts, as well as the Chair of the Stanford Drama Department.
Elam is author of Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka; The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (winner of the 2005 Errol Hill Award from the American Society of Theatre Research); and co‑editor of four books, African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader (winner of the 2001 Errol Hill Award from the American Society of Theatre Research); Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Drama; The Fire This Time: African American Plays for the New Millennium; and Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Performance and Popular Culture. His articles have appeared in American Theater, American Drama, Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, Text and Performance Quarterly, as well as journals in Belgium, Israel, Poland, and Taiwan. He has also written essays published in several critical anthologies. Elam is the outgoing editor of Theatre Journal and on the editorial boards of Atlantic Studies, Journal ofAmerican Drama and Theatre, and Modern Drama.
In 2006, Elam was the winner of the Betty Jones Award for Outstanding Teaching from the American Theatre and Drama Society, the winner of the Excellence in Editing Award from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education, and the winner of the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society of Theatre Research. He was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre in April 2006.
At Stanford he has been awarded five different teaching awards: the ASSU Award for Undergraduate Teaching, Small Classes (1992); the Humanities and Sciences Deans Distinguished Teaching Award (1993); the Black Community Service Center Outstanding Teacher Award (1994), the Bing Teaching Fellowship for Undergraduate Teaching (1994-1997); and the Rhodes Prize for Undergraduate Teaching (1998).
In addition to his scholarly work, he has directed professionally for more than eighteen years. Most notably, he directed Tod, the Boy Tod by Talvin Wilks for the Oakland Ensemble Company, and for TheatreWorks in Palo Alto he directed Jar the Floor by Cheryl West and Blues for an Alabama Sky by Pearl Cleage, which was nominated for nine Bay Area Circle Critics Awards and was the winner of DramaLogue Awards for Best Production, Best Design, Best Ensemble Cast, and Best Direction. He has directed several of August Wilson’s plays, including Joe Turner’sCome and Gone, Two Trains Running, and Fences, the latter ofwhich won eight Bay Area “Choice” Awards.
Elam received his AB from Harvard College in 1978 and his PhD in Dramatic Arts from the University of California-Berkeley in 1984.
Kristine Elliott Lecturer, ballet
Following a professional career of fifteen years as a company member of American Ballet Theatre and the Stuttgart Ballet, Kristine Elliott now dedicates herself to teaching, coaching, and mentoring aspiring dancers.
As Director of Ballet in the Dance Division of the Department of Drama, Kristine teaches classical ballet at all levels, in addition to coaching students in both repertory and performance. From 2000-2003, she served as Faculty Adviser to the Cardinal Ballet, culminating with a performance of George Balanchine’s “The Four Temperaments,” courtesy of the Balanchine Trust, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Balanchine’s birth.
With support from Stanford University, Kristine has traveled to South Africa for three consecutive years to teach ballet and conduct research in Johannesburg and the townships of Cape Town. Through her work with the Dance For All program in Guguletu, near Cape Town, she has discovered how the study of ballet can change thelives of children from the most impoverished communities. Her work has also been supported by grants from the Flora Foundation and many private individuals.
During her dancing career, Elliott worked with luminaries such as Rudolph Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Natalia Markova, Fernando Bujones, and George Balanchine; performed in the original casts of choreographies by Twyla Tharp, Antony Tudor, and Jiri Kylian; danced principal roles in Giselle, Coppélia, The Nutcracker, Raymonda, Theme and Variations, and Miss Julie; and performed in film and television.
Since 1990, Kristine has been a guest teacher for company class at American Ballet Theatre in New York and San Francisco. She has been a guest teacher since 1996 at Ballet Theatre’s Summer Intensive Workshop in New York City, where she teaches advanced ballet technique and repertory to selected students. In 2004, she expanded her summer guest teaching schedule to include the Extreme Ballet Program at Kaatsbaan International Dance Center in Tivoli, New York.
Erik Flatmo Set Designer; Lecturer
Erik Flatmo teaches set design in the Department of Drama and continues to work professionally as a set designer based in San Francisco. Prior to joining Stanford, he taught at Barnard College in New York City for three years where he also worked on theatre and dance projects ranging from Off-Broadway to Broadway and the Metropolitan Opera.
His professional focus is on original plays and dance pieces, and he has designed premiere productions of plays by emerging playwrights Julia Jordan, Brooke Berman, Gary Sunshine, Zakiyyah Alexander, and Anne Washburn. Locally, he has collaborated extensively with the director/playwright John Fisher, currently artistic director of San Francisco’s Theatre Rhinoceros. Upcoming work includes projects at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre, San Francisco Opera Center and Joe Goode Dance Company.
Flatmo received a BA in Architecture from Columbia University and an MFA in Design from the Yale School of Drama. He was born and raised in Palo Alto.
Diane Frank
Lecturer: Modern dance, advanced Merce Cunningham-based technique, choreography, repertory projects, guest artist commissions and residency activities
After completing a BFA in Theater (Ohio University) and an MA in Dance (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana), Diane Frank taught for four years in the Dance Department at the University of Maryland, where she was a founding member of the Maryland Dance Theater. She then moved to New York City to begin an eleven-year career with Douglas Dunn and Dancers, touring nationally and internationally. As a scholarship student, she was invited by Merce Cunningham to join the teaching staff of the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio, where she taught for eight years. At Cunningham’s request, she taught both technique and repertory at the American Center’s Atelier Cunningham. A frequent guest teacher at the Paris Opera, she assisted Douglas Dunn in both the creation of new work for the Opera and the setting of established repertory. Frank has been the recipient of seven NEA Choreography Fellowships for collaborative choreographic projects with Deborah Riley, as well as commissions from the Jerome Foundation, DTW, Dance Bay Area, and Meet the Composer, and Arts Silicon Valley. Her work has been performed both in the United States and abroad.
At Stanford since 1988, Frank teaches intermediate and advanced modern technique, choreography, and mentors graduate and undergraduate student dance projects. She organizes and advises Stanford’s student participation in the American College Dance
Festival as well as other Divisional dance education and performance projects on- and off-campus. She is the Co-Director of the Dance Division's annual concert, and also organizes numerous choreographic commissions by guest artists for Stanford student dancers, for which she frequently acts as Rehearsal Director. In 2005, she played a significant role in the development of Stanford Lively Arts’ campus-wide interdisciplinary arts event “Encounter: Merce,” organizing its “Music and Dance by Chance” commissions, as well as an IHUM lecture series on Cunningham’s video dances and concert repertory.
Most recently, Frank has been instrumental in developing a number of residency projects and artistic collaborations for the Dance Division, notably the recent class and repertory reconstruction project of Anna Halprin’s Myths as well as Under the skin, a collaborative performance project bringing together artists, physicians and residents from the Medical School, and community performers. She also recently taught “The Duets Project,” a performance class that examined partnering through duet repertory. In the spring of 2008, she will teach a new course, “Figure/Ground: Site-Specific Dance Performance in Outdoor Environments.” Complementing this course, she has conceived and organized Red Rover, a series of commissioned site-specific dance performances which will take place on the grounds of Stanford campus on May 28, 2008. Red Rover, a collaborative effort with Stanford Lively Arts, has been awarded support from the Stanford Initiative for Creativity and the Arts. Frank is a frequent guest teacher at Bay Area dance studios, colleges, and universities. A strong proponent of arts education, she consults and volunteers in the development of dance and live arts activities for public schools and the community. She also directs the Dance Division’s summer dance intensive for high school students through US Performing Arts. Frank is currently on the steering committee for the Stanford Institute for Diversity in the Arts.
Amy Freed Artist-in-Residence
Amy Freed is the author of Restoration Comedy, The Beard of Avon, Safe in Hell, Freedomland, The Psychic Life of Savages, and other plays. Her work has been produced at New York Theatre Workshop, Playwright’s Horizons, South Coast Rep, Seattle Repertory Theater, California Shakespeare Festival, American Conservatory Theater, the Goodman Theatre, Yale Rep, Woolly Mammoth, and many other theaters around the country. Her recent play, Restoration Comedy, will receive its third major production at San Diego’s Old Globe in March of 2007, where she will be also be Playwright-in-Residence. It debuted at Seattle Repertory in December 2005, and in 2006 received its Bay Area premiere at the California Shakespeare Festival. Freed has been the recipient of the Joseph Kesselring Award, the Charles MacArthur Award, is a several times winner of the LA Drama Critics Circle Award, and was a Pulitzer finalist for Freedomland.
Michael Gonzales Academic Technology Specialist
Michael Gonzalez joined Stanford after working for several years as an academic editor with the manufacturer of InfoTrac, an online and CD-ROM information-retrieval company. At Stanford, he is part of the Academic Technology Specialist (ATS) program under the Academic Computing Department of the Stanford University Libraries.
As ATS, Gonzalez provided technology support for History Department faculty and their students primarily to help them use web technology to enhance classroom lectures and presentations. He also worked at Stanford’s Overseas Studies Program where he continued to explore distributed classrooms and collaborative teaching using network video-conferencing and the world wide web.
Currently, Gonzalez serves as the ATS for the Art/Art History and Drama Departments, where he assists faculty and graduate students gain facility with digital technology and its workflows. He has worked with several funded technology projects, including Medieval Spains and the Digital Parker Library.
Gonzalez has degrees in Social Anthropology and History and has lectured at CSUH (East Bay) and at Stanford. He writes occasional history articles for the monthly Filipinas Magazine, plays the classic guitar, and is an avid collector of rare guitars. He also teaches anthropology on weekends at City College San Francisco.
Anne Gordon Administrative Services Manager in the Department of Drama
Aleta Hayes Lecturer, contemporary dance and performance
Aleta Hayes is a contemporary dancer, choreographer, performer, and teacher. Before her appointment at Stanford, Ms. Hayes taught for eight years at Princeton University in the Program in Theater and Dance and the Program in African American Studies. While at Princeton, Ms. Hayes developed pedagogically innovative courses that combined cultural and performance history, theory, and performance. She has also taught at Wesleyan University, Swarthmore College, and Rutgers University. Ms. Hayes holds an M.F.A. in Dance and Choreography from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and a B.A., with Departmental Honors, in Drama, Dance and the Visual Arts from Stanford University (1991).
Aleta Hayes lived and worked in New York City for fifteen years, choreographing solo and group dance pieces, in which her performances often interpolated acting and singing. Highlights include: Hatsheput, presented at the Place Theater, London and St. Marks Church, New York; Tarantantara, presented at Jacob’s Pillow; and La Chanteuse Nubienne (written by playwright Daniel Alexander Jones), performed for Movement Research at Judson Church. Ms. Hayes collaborated, as choreographer and dance/vocal soloist, with the poet Yusef Komunyakaa and composer William Banfield, on Ish-Scoodah, a chamber opera with dance about the nineteenth century African American sculptor, Edmonia Lewis. She also had leading roles in major works by other artists such as Jane Comfort (the trip-hop dance/opera Asphalt, with a book by Carl Hancock Rux) and Robert Wilson (the opera The Temptation of St Anthony, with gospel and other African American spiritual music forms and libretto by Bernice Johnson Reagon). Ms. Hayes has continued to perform in the subsequent international presentations of The Temptation of St Anthony.
In 2004, Ms. Hayes returned to Stanford on a Ford Foundation Resident Dialogues Fellowship through the Committee on Black Performing Arts, for which she created The Wedding Project, a performance piece of multiple genres illustrating the evolution of American social dance through the narrative of African American wedding traditions. She extended this "theater of mixed forms" (the critic Anna Kisselgoff’s term) into community dialogue when she was a 2005 Peninsula Community Foundation Artist-in-Residence at Eastside Preparatory School in East Palo Alto. That residence culminated in The ReMix Project, where she collaborated with students to create and perform a montage of music, monologue, and movement examining student aspirations in a low-income, racially-mixed neighborhood.
In the winter of 2005, Ms. Hayes had the lead acting role in the Stanford performance of Suzan-Lori Park’s In the Blood, directed by Professor Harry Elam. In the spring of 2006, she choreographed, danced, spoke, and sang a multimedia solo piece, Deianeira (an adoption of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis) created for Ms. Hayes and directed by Drama and Classics Professor Rush Rehm.
Branislav Jakovljevic Avant-garde and experimental theater, performance theory, critical theory
Branislav Jakovljevic joined the Department of Drama in the fall of 2006. His areas of scholarly interests include the avant-garde (across disciplines - theater, literature, visual arts, music - and periods - European avant-gardes of the late 19th and early 20th century, post-WWII avant-garde in Europe and America), theater history, dramaturgy, performance theory, philosophy of the event, and, most recently, performance and law. He is teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in the avant-garde, performance theory, and theater history.
He has published essays on a broad variety of subjects, from the history of late 19th-century theater, to the Russian and Soviet avant-garde, to contemporary American experimental performance (The Wooster Group, composer John Adams, the site-specific performance group Skewed Visions). His works have been published in the United States (Theatre Journal, TDR, PAJ, Art Journal, Theater) and in Europe (Serbia, United Kingdom, Spain, Sweden, and Belgium). His book manuscript Daniil Kharms: Writing and the Event is under consideration at Northwestern University Press. Branislav received his B.A. in Dramaturgy from the School of Theater, Film, Television and Radio in Belgrade, Serbia, where he also worked professionally in theater as a dramaturg and wrote theater criticism. In the early 1990s two of his plays were staged in theaters of the former Yugoslavia. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in the Department of Performance Studies, New York University.
Dan Klein Lecturer, improvisation
Dan Klein has returned to Stanford to teach Improvisational Theater and to direct the Stanford Improvisors. As an undergraduate at Stanford, he was a founding member of the SImps and perennial TA for Patricia Ryan Madson, his predecessor. After graduating, Klein joined the performing company BATS Improv in San Francisco, where he also coached and served as Dean of the BATS Improv School. As a renegade improv teacher, Klein has had appointments at the American Conservatory Theater, the Academy of Art University, the Berkeley Repertory Theater, Dominican University, Vector Conservatory, Menlo School, and has taught corporate workshops for clients like Visa, Cisco, Sun, Oracle, Schwab, Kaiser, Clorox, Cadence, Clif Bar, and others. He is also a member of the Kasper Hauser Comedy Group, authors of SkyMaul, the in-flight catalog parody.
Kay Kostopoulos Lecturer, acting
Kay Kostopoulos teaches undergraduate acting, acting pedagogy for graduate students, and directs at Stanford. She is an MFA graduate of ACT, where she taught acting and directed student projects as a core faculty member of ACT’s Advanced Training Program for six years. She has acted at ACT, the Magic Theatre, and at the San Francisco, New Jersey, and California Shakespeare Festivals. She also served as Education Director at the California Shakespeare Festival. Roles performed include Euridyke in Antigone, the Countess in All’s Well That Ends Well, the title roles in Shaw’s Major Barbara and Racine’s Andromache, Kleopatra in Gorky’s Enemies, Queen Elizabeth in Richard III, Mistress Page in Merry Wives of Windsor, and Goneril in King Lear. Two of her favorite roles have been Agnes X and The Coach in Still Warm, and Anne Sexton in The Psychic Life of Savages, both by teaching colleague and Stanford Artist-in-Residence Amy Freed. She has appeared for four seasons at Stanford Summer Theater: in Freed’s adaptation of Lysistrata; as Babette in Biedermann and the Firebugs; as Sarah in The Lover by Harold Pinter, with Stanford Professor and teaching colleague Rush Rehm; and as Berinthia in Amy Freed’s Restoration Comedy.
Along with her teaching work in Stanford’s Continuing Studies Program, Kostopoulos performed the voices of Athena, Penelope, Circe, Calypso, and Helen in Encountering Homer’s Odyssey, an online classics program through the Stanford/Princeton/Yale Alliance. She also directed and acted in a staged reading of Hilton Obenzinger’s novel, Running Through Fire, and is directing a reading of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, to be presented by Stanford Continuing Studies’ Aurora Forum. Kostopoulos has also taught acting at Dominican University, City College of San Francisco, American Musical Theatre of San Jose, and DeAnza College. She is a professional jazz singer who performs regularly with her ensemble, Black Olive Jazz.
Tony Kramer Director of the Dance Division; Senior Lecturer, jazz and modern dance, composition, improvisation
Tony Kramer joined the Stanford faculty in 1986 as a teacher of modern dance, jazz dance, composition, and improvisation, and has been the Director of the Dance Division since September 2002. As the Technical Director of the Stanford Dance Division’s productions, he is involved in every aspect of production from the creation of dances to their final mounting on stage. A composer as well as a dancer, he has created many original musical scores for his own and others’ dances. He is a former company member of Wimmer, Wimmer, and Dancers, and the Oregon Dance Theatre.
Patricia Ryan Madson Senior Lecturer Emerita
Patricia Ryan Madson was the 1998 winner of the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for Outstanding Innovation in Undergraduate Education. She was on the faculty in the Drama Department at Stanford University from 1977 until 2005. She has served as the head of the Undergraduate Acting Program. Founder and coach of the Stanford Improvisors, she taught beginning and advanced level courses in improvisation for undergraduates as well as adults in Stanford’s Continuing Studies Program. In 1996 she founded the Creativity Initiative at Stanford, an interdisciplinary alliance of faculty who shared the belief that creativity can be taught.
Ryan Madson has taught “Design Improv” for the School of Engineering and was a Guest Lecturer for Engineering 145, Stanford Technology Ventures Program. She teaches regularly for the Esalen Institute, and has given workshops for Sun Microsystems Japan Division, the California Institute for Integral Studies, the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, the National Association of Drama Therapists, the Western Psychological Association, Duke University East Asian Studies Center, and the Meaningful Life Therapy Association in Japan. Ryan Madson combines her work in improvisation with work as a counselor using an Eastern approach to problem solving known as Constructive Living. Dr. David K. Reynolds certified her as a Constructive Living Instructor in 1987 at the Health Center Pacific on Maui. Additionally, she has been the American Coordinator of the Oomoto School of Traditional Japanese Arts in Kameoka, Japan. There she has studied tea ceremony and calligraphy.
Ryan Madson’s published writings include a chapter on constructive living in the 1995 anthology Mindfulness and Meaningful Work, edited by Claude Whitmyer (Parallex Press), as well as chapters in the SUNY Press books Plunging Through the Clouds and Flowing Bridges, Quiet Waters. Her first book, Improv Wisdom: Don’t Prepare, Just Show Up was published by Random House (Bell Tower) in 2005, and named “One of the Best Spiritual Books of 2005” by Spirituality and Health.
Patrick McKenna Shop Technician
Patrick is a Shop Technician for the Drama Department.
Kenny McMullen Stage Technician
Kenny provides support to productions as Master Electrician and Supervisor of lighting installations. He has more than twenty years of experience in technical theater and works as Master Electrician, Head Rail, and Stagehand for a variety of performing arts groups in the Bay Area.
Cherríe Moraga Artist-in-Residence, playwriting, Chicana/o drama
Cherríe Moraga is playwright, poet, and essayist whose plays and publications have received national recognition, including a Theatre Communications Group Theatre Artist Residency Grant in 1996, the NEA’s Theatre Playwrights’ Fellowship in 1993, and two Fund for New American Plays Awards (for Shadow of a Man in 1990 and Watsonville: Some Place Not Here in 1995). A San Francisco Bay Area writer, Moraga has premiered her work at Theatre Artaud, Theatre Rhinoceros, the Eureka Theatre, and Brava Theater Center. Brava’s production of Heroes and Saints in 1992 received numerous awards for best original script, including the Will Glickman Prize, the Drama-logue and Critic Circles Awards and the Pen West Award. Her plays have been presented throughout the Southwest, as well as in Chicago, Seattle and New York. In 1995, Heart of the Earth, Moraga’s adaptation of the Popol Vuh, the Maya creation myth, opened at the Public Theatre and INTAR Theatre in New York City.
Moraga has also published extensively as an essayist and poet. She is the co-editor of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, which won the Before Columbus American Book Award in 1986, and was re-released in a twentieth anniversary edition in 2002. She is the author of Loving in the War Years: Lo Que Nunca Pasó Por Sus Labios (1983/2003) and The Last Generation (1993), published by South End Press of Cambridge, MA. In 1997, she published a memoir on motherhood entitled Waiting in the Wings (Ithaca, New York: Firebrand Books). Moraga has also published three volumes of drama through West End Press of Albuquerque, NM. They include: Heroes and Saints and Other Plays (1994),Watsonville/Circle in the Dirt (2002), and The Hungry Woman (2001). Ms. Moraga is presently working on a novel and is completing a new collection of essays entitled A Xicanadyke Codex of Changing Consciousness.
Robert Moses Artist-in-Residence
Choreographer Robert Moses founded Robert Moses’ Kin in 1995 and since then has created numerous works of varying styles and genres for his highly praised dance company. He has created commissioned works for England’s Transitions Dance Company of the Laban Centre; Dance Exchange in London; African Cultural Exchange in Birmingham, UK; Oakland Ballet; Cincinnati Ballet; Lawrence Pech Dance Company; Robert Henry Johnson Dance Company; and Savage Jazz Dance Company, among others. His work has been performed nationally and internationally, including England, Italy, and Ireland, and he has performed with his company at many nationally esteemed venues such as Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival (2002 and 2004), Colorado Dance Festival, and the Bates Dance Festival.
Moses and his company have been honored with many prestigious grants and awards, among these an Irvine Dancemakers grant; three project awards from the NEA, a 1998, 2001, and 2003 Isadora Duncan Dance Award (Izzie); the Bonnie Bird North American Choreography Award; a San Francisco Bay Guardian Goldie; and the SF Weekly Black Box Award. Moses has held residencies at ODC Theater and in the San Francisco public schools as part of the San Francisco Arts in Education Foundation Artist-in-Residence Program, and was a Duke/Wattis Artist-in-Residence at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Moses’ film and theater credits include major productions for the Lorraine Hansberry Theater, New Conservatory Theater, Los Angeles Prime Moves Festival (L.A.C.E.), Olympic Arts Festival, and Black Choreographers Moving Toward the Twenty-First Century. Moses has collaborated with many notable artists; among them are Julia Adam, Margaret Jenkins, Alonzo King, Sara Shelton Mann, SoVoSo, Marcus Shelby, Keith Terry, Frank Boehm, Will Power, Somei Yoshino Taiko Ensemble, and Youth Speaks.
Moses has been on faculty at Stanford University since 1995 and teaches ongoing technique classes at San Francisco Dance Center. He has been a Master Teacher or Guest Faculty at Columbia College Chicago, the Bates Dance Festival, Colorado Dance Festival, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, University of Texas, University of Nevada, Mills College, San Jose State University, Saint Mary’s College, California Dance Educators Association, American College Dance Festival, and San Francisco Dance Center.
Prior to establishing Robert Moses’ Kin, Moses has been a member of American Ballet Theatre, Twyla Tharp Dance, ODC/San Francisco, Long Beach Ballet, Walt Disney World Productions, and Gloria Newman Dance Theater, among others. He graduated from CSULB.
Rika Onizuka Lecturer, ballet
A native of the Bay Area, Rika Nina Onizuka began her training locally with Richard Gibson and Zory Karah. She then went on to study at the San Francisco Ballet School, and as a scholarship student at the Joffrey Ballet School and David Howard Dance Center in New York. As a founding member of Smuin Ballets SF, Ms. Onizuka danced many leading roles such as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, Miranda in The Tempest, Shinju, and many other roles created for her by Michael Smuin.
Ms. Onizuka most recently danced with Ballet San Jose (formerly Cleveland Ballet) where she enjoyed leading roles in the Nutcracker, Who Cares?, Death and Eros, and Appalachian Spring. She also danced with Joffrey II, Ohio Ballet, and San Francisco Opera, and worked with such choreographers as Alonzo King, Donald Byrd, Laura Dean, and Donald Mckayle. She appeared in the nationally televised “Ira Gershwin at 100” at Carnegie Hall and in feature films such as The Fantastiks and The Matrix Revolutions. Ms. Onizuka has taught ballet throughout the Bay Area, most recently at Los Gatos Ballet, Pacific Ballet Academy, and is on staff at the Ballet San Jose School.
Heather Patterson Cutter/Draper
Heather Patterson is a Cutter/Draper for the Drama Department. She received her BS from the University of California, Davis in costume design. She has worked in design, construction, and patternmaking for UC Davis, West Bay Opera, and Stanford Summer Theater, as well as for the fashion industry.
Birgit Pfeffer Costume Shop Supervisor
Birgit Pfeffer is the Costume Shop Supervisor for the Department of Drama. Among her many projects, she teaches students the fine art of costume creation and current pattern design techniques as a lab (Drama 39C).
Pfeffer began her fashion career seventeen years ago and was awarded the coveted “Best of Bavaria” award in 1990. She received her Masters Degree in tailoring from Handwerkskammer (1995, Munich, Germany) and has held senior design and manager positions with TheatreWorks (San Francisco Bay Area), A.T. Jones and Sons (Baltimore, Maryland) and Südostbayerisches Städte Theater (Landshut, Germany). Prior experiences included costuming for the Resideztheater in Munich and her apprenticeship period with Mode Atelier in Deggendorf, Germany.
Her numerous freelance projects include costume creations for the Washington and Baltimore Operas, custom fashions for Ella Moda, LemonTwist, and Frasier, and costumes for San Francisco’s renowned Sumin Ballet and San Francisco Ballet.
Some of the more notable projects she has been associated with include custom stage creations for Romeo and Juliet, Godot, The Robbers, and Spring Awakening (Munich); Mary Stuart, Little Shop of Horrors, and Goldberg Variations (Landshut); Carmen and Die Tote Stadt (Baltimore); Sideshow, Sunday in the Park with George, Cabaret, and Ducky (TheatreWorks); Redemption, The Camp, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Stanford); plus the recent hit, Dancing with Gershwin (Smuin Ballet), Chi lin (San Francisco Ballet), Le Carnaval des Animaux (San Francisco Ballet), Lamberena (Singapore Dance Theater), 7 for Eight (San Francisco Ballet), and Reflections (San Francisco Ballet).
Katie Pfeiffer Graphic Designer and Publicist
Katie Pfeiffer is the Graphic Designer and Publicist for the Department of Drama. She has a degree in Art History from Stanford University, and background in photography, design, and German.
Peggy Phelan The Ann O’Day Maples Chair in the Arts and Professor of Drama and English Areas of Interest: Twentieth-Century Performance, queer and feminist theory, twentieth-century dance and visual art
