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. 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.

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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Matthew Goulish

Visiting Artist, Directing.Matthew Goulish is a member of the performance groups Goat Island and Every House has a door, author of 39 Microlectures – in proximity of performance, and co-editor of Small Acts of Repair – Performance, Ecology, and Goat Island, both published by Routledge. He teaches in the MFA and BFA Writing Programs at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He edits the Provocations section of The Drama Review. He has published and lectured widely, was awarded and Honorary Doctorate from Dartington College of Arts in 2007, and received a Lannan Foundation writer’s residency in 2004.

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Lin Hixson

Visiting Artist, Directing. Lin Hixson, co-founder of the former collaborative performance group Goat Island, co-founded in 1987 and the performance company Every House has a door, co-founded with Matthew Goulish in 2008. She is Professor in Performance at The School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Goat Island has created nine performance works and toured extensively in the US, England, Scotland, Wales, Belgium, Switzerland, Croatia, Germany, and Canada. Goa Festival.
Hixson was awarded a Doctor of Arts Honorary Degree from Dartington College of the Arts in 2007. She received her M.F.A. in 1980 from Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design. She was a founding member of the Los Angeles performance collective Hangers (1978-1981). She has received numerous National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in New Genres and Choreography and three Illinois Arts Council fellowships in performance.
Her writing on directing and performance has been published in the journals P-Form, TDR, Frakcija, Performance Research, Women and Performance, and Whitewalls; and included in the anthologies Small Acts of Repair - Performance, Ecology, and Goat Island, Live Art and Performance, Theatre in Crisis?, and the textbook Place and Placelessness in Performance. She has directed two films, Daynightly They re-school you The Bears-Polka and It's Aching Like Birds, in collaboration with the artist Lucy Cash and Goat Island.

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Robert Melrose

Visiting Artist, Directing. is the artistic director and co-founder of The Cutting Ball Theater where he has directed Endgame, The Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, Hamletmachine, As You Like It, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Mayakovsky: A Tragedy, My Head Was a Sledgehammer, Roberto Zucco, The Vomit Talk of Ghosts (world premiere), The Sandalwood Box, Pickling, Ajax for example, Helen of Troy (world premiere) and Drowning Room (world premiere) and has translated No Exit, Woyzeck and Ubu Roi. He has directed at The Guthrie Theater: Pen; The California Shakespeare Theater: Villains, Fools, and Lovers; Actors’ Collective: Hedda Gabler; Alias Stage: Creditors; Crowded Fire: The Train Play; C.A.F.E.: Chain Reactions; Perishable Theatre: All Spoken by a Shining Creature (world premiere); Yale Summer Cabaret: Endgame, The Shawl; Princeton Summer Theater: Twelfth Night. As assistant director he has worked at The Public Theater / New York Shakespeare Festival: Hamlet (Oskar Eustis, director) Berkeley Repertory Theatre: The Pillowman (Les Waters, director) American Conservatory Theatre: Indian Ink (Carey Perloff, director); The Guthrie Theater: Othello (Joe Dowling, director) Yale Repertory Theatre: Twelfth Night (Mark Rucker, director) and as directing intern at The McCarter Theatre: The Glass Menagerie (Emily Mann, director). He has a M.F.A. in directing from the Yale School of Drama and graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University. He received a Fox Foundation Fellowship to observe rehearsals and productions of Shakespeare in translation in France, German and Italy and to study Strindberg in Sweden. He also received a Ford Fellowship to study Commedia dell’Arte in Italy with Antonio Fava and is a 2007 – 2009 recipient of the NEA / TCG Career Development Program for Directors.

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