Amy Freed

Artist-in-Residence, Playwriting. 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.

Cherríe Moraga

Artist-in-Residence, Playwriting, Chicana/o Drama. Cherríe Moraga is a playwright, poet, and essayist whose plays and publications have received national recognition. She was recently awarded the 2007 United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature. She has also received 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.

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Robert Moses

Artist-in-Residence, Dance. 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.

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Chad Bonaker

Visiting Instructor, Technical Theater. Chad Bonaker has been designing lighting for the theater since 1995 when he was offered the opportunity to design Gaieties in his sophomore year at Stanford University. That experience so sparked his interest in lighting that the following year, he took a class in lighting from Peter Maradudin, who was filling in for Michael Ramsaur while the latter was on sabbatical. When Michael returned he took Mr. Bonaker on as protege -- a relationship that continues to this day. Lighting has enabled Mr. Bonaker to travel the world. He has designed shows in Shang Hai China, Belgrade Serbia, and all over the Western United States. In 2005 he received his MFA from the College Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati. He currently is the resident designer at the Utah Festival Opera in Logan, Utah, and at Children's Musical Theater in San Jose, California. He has designed for several Bay Area theater companies including Broadway by the Bay, Theatreworks (Mountain View), Stanford Summer Theater, and West Bay Opera. He recently returned to his home state of Colorado where he is now actively looking for work in Denver and the surrounding areas.

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Ann Carlson

Visiting Artist, Modern Dance, Performance Art. Ann Carlson is a dancer, choreographer, and performance artist. She creates “dances that reflect and investigate the metaphor of the everyday” and are coauthored by the performers, who have included non-dancers, such as lawyers, doctors, and nuns (“the real-people series”). With a background in visual and performance art, Carlson often shows her work in unconventional dance sites, including museums, trains, and barnyards.

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