JAMES CLEMENTS
Ecology of New York Theatre
JAMES CLEMENTS is a Scottish actor, writer, theatermaker and arts educator based between New York and Scotland. Clements has performed at venues including La Mama, BRIC, HERE and MITU580, and has written and directed projects at the Public, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, the 92nd Street Y, Culture Lab, Brooklyn Art Haus, The Colony Theatre (Miami), The Keegan Theatre (Washington D.C), Dundee Rep (Dundee) and the Stockwell Playhouse (London). His acting has been called “impressive…incredibly compelling…excellent,” (BroadwayWorld), “[his] portrayal…shines brightest” (BlogCritics) and “the strongest of the cast” (My Entertainment World), and his plays have been described by critics as “searing” (New York Times), "magnifying" (TimeOut), "compelling" (The Guardian), "intricate" (BroadwayWorld), "affecting" (Playbill) and "intellectual" (Theatre is Easy). He is a member of the Adjunct Faculty at NYU Tisch and Marymount Manhattan College. He is Co-Artistic Director of What Will the Neighbours Say?, a Brooklyn-based documentary theatre company and a Board Member of the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York. Previous residencies include The Cell, Culture Lab, Brooklyn Arts Council, NYU and BRIClab. His work has been recognised by the Queens Council for the Arts, DCLA, NYFA, A.R.T./NY, NYU and Creatives Rebuild New York, amongst others. He is represented for film and television by Swain-Thomas Agency, and recent credits include voicing a national commercial for The Botanist Islay Gin during the Super Bowl. www.james-clements.com.
ROBERT DAVIS
Topics in Performance Studies: Museums, Fairs, Sideshows
Robert Davis is an Instructor in the Tisch Drama Department. His dissertation, “Performance and Spectatorship in United States International Expositions, 1876-1893” looks at audience behavior at world’s fairs, sections of which have been published in The World’s Fair Reader (2014) and Classics in the Modern World: A Democratic Turn? (2013). He has also published in The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (2015), Comparative Drama (2011), and The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (2011, with Amanda Wrigley). Currently, he is under contract to write a game for Choice of Games about managing a theatre in nineteenth-century New York.
JOHN DIETRICH
History of American Musical
John has had an extensive career as a professional Director/Choreographer/Writer that includes a 17-year relationship with Radio City Entertainment, where he was the Director/ Choreographer for the world-famous Rockettes, for Rockette Special Events (including numerous Macy’s Parade and Today Show appearances, the Presidential Inauguration, and the NBC Gala Re-Opening of Radio City), as well as being the director/choreographer for the Radio City Christmas Spectacular. Other work includes hundreds of shows in a vast range of entertainment genres: from television to Off-Broadway & regional theatre, from industrial shows to ice shows. Some highlights include: National/International Tours of The Wizard of Oz, Beauty & the Beast, and Singin’ in the Rain, Disney On Ice The Little Mermaid, A&E Television Special Gershwin on Ice, Mack & Mabel in Concert at Lincoln Center, and 7 years directing ABC Daytime Salutes Broadway Cares/Equity Fights Aids. He was also the Creative Director for Niles Creative Group, a film production company specializing in large scale theatrically based film and video productions and art installations worldwide.
As a writer, he wrote the book & lyrics for the musical Things As They Are, based on the life of documentary photographer Dorothea Lange with composer Jonathan Comisar. It was a Next Link selection for the New York Musical Theatre Festival and received the “Best of Fest” Award for most popular show. It was also twice nominated for the prestigious Fred Ebb Award. The musical Only Anne, (Composer – Will Buck), an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion set in the 1920’s jazz age, was selected for development at the 2015 Rhinebeck Writer’s Retreat and the 2016 Goodspeed Festival of New Musicals. Selections from Only Anne were orchestrated by the Broadway legend Bill Brohn and performed by the Chelsea Symphony at the 2015 MTF New Orchestrations Gala. The musical Lautrec at the St. James (Composer - Julianne Wick Davis) was produced at the 2019 NAMT Conference and a Concert version was produced in 2022 at the Olney Theater. He has written for Walt Disney Entertainment, and continues to write and direct for Dolly Parton & Dollywood Entertainment.
He received his MFA from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, in Musical Theatre Writing, and his MA from New York University Gallatin School in Musical Theatre Structure & Directing Theory. He also holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Wisconsin. He spent 3 years on the adjunct faculty at Marymount College of Manhattan teaching Musical Theatre Performance. He currently teaches at the Dramatists Guild Institute and in NYU Tisch Open Arts where he teaches the History of the American Musical. John is a member of the Dramatists Guild.
FRITZ ERTL
Directing Practicum; Theatrical Genres: Comedy & Performance
Fritz Ertl is a director and educator. He has produced or directed world premieres of plays by Steven Drukman, Erik Ehn, and Paula Vogel, and has worked at theatres such as Berkshire Theatre Festival, BACA Downtown, Here, and Incubator Arts Project. At NYU Fritz has directed Pentecost, by David Edgar, The Pains of Youth, by Ferdinand Brukner, and Mad Forest, by Caryl Churchill, among others. In recent years, he has been working on a series of new plays exploring the catastrophic consequences of globalization: Youth in Asia: A Techno Fantasia (aka the resistance project), written by Steven Drukman; Foxhollow (aka the animal project), by Steven Drukman; There Was and There Wasn't: An Old Iraqi Folktale (aka the queeraq project), written by Daniel Glen; and Carla and Lewis (aka the ecocide project), by Shonni Enelow. Fritz has been teaching at NYU since 1990 and is the former Managing Director of the Drama Department at Tisch. He spent the 2005-06 academic year in Dublin, where he was the program director of the Tisch Dublin Acting Conservatory. At PHTS he is the head of curriculum, and teaches directing.
JOSEPH JEFFREYS
Realism & Naturalism
Joe E. Jeffreys is a drag historian, dramaturge, and video artist whose work has received funding from the Jerome Foundation.
He has published in academic journals including The Drama Review, Theatre History Studies, and Women & Performance, essay anthologies including We Will Be Citizens: New Essays on Gay and Lesbian Theatre and Art, Glitter and Glitz: Mainstream Playwrights and Popular Theatre in 1920s America, encyclopedias and in the popular press including The Village Voice, Out, and The Advocate. Jeffreys has been interviewed about the art of drag by a wide range of media outlets including Time, The New York Times, The Guardian, the BBC, Entertainment Tonight, L’Obs, Vice and Food and Wine and featured as a talking head on the subject in documentaries including P.S. Burn This Letter Please, Ruminations and Miss Rose Wood.
Jeffreys teaches a wide range of Major Playwrights courses for the Drama Department including ones on Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, and Samuel Beckett and the Absurdists. He has led the department’s LGBTQ+ performance class for many years including a full semester devoted to examining RuPaul’s Drag Race and its Impact.
As a dramaturge Jeffreys worked on the world premiere of Tennessee William’s last full-length play, In Masks Outrageous and Austere, the NYC premiere of William’s Green Eyes, and Michael Baron’s Charles Ludlam bio inspired play The Whore of Sheridan Square. Recently Jeffreys served as a research consultant to Tina Landau and Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Steppenwolf production of their original work Ms. Blakk for President.
For the past decade Jeffreys has actively video documented the NYC drag scene and this work has screened internationally at festivals, museums and galleries including The Museum of Arts and Design and The Tate Modern. Samples of his video work can be seen at https://vimeo.com/joejeffreys.
(SAJ) STEFANIE JONES
Major Playwrights: Women Playwrights of Color
SAJ (PhD) is a disabled, infinifat, queer, trans, and white working-class educator, community organizer, and McNair scholar. They have published in edited collections as well as in Cultural Dynamics, The Journal of Dramatic Theator and Criticism, and Theatre Journal. SAJ is also a co-editor of the journal Lateral (https://csalateral.org/). They are currently finishing their first book, which explores twenty-first century racial capitalist ideologies and the connections between Broadway, racial class formation, and political economic practice. SAJ is also co-editing two additonal volumes, Love Letters to Sick and Disabled Queers, and Cultural Studies in the Interregnum (under contract with Temple University Press).
KEVIN KUHLKE
Directing Practicum
Kevin Kuhlke is an Arts Professor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts' Department of Drama, specializing in acting (advanced scene study), directing, improvisation, and physical theatre.
He has acted with Anne Bogart, Robert Wilson, Mabou Mines, the Builders Association, the Iowa Theatre Lab, and the Holderness Company regionally and in New York including Lincoln Center, the Public Theater, PS 122, Danspace, MOMA, the Franklin Furnace, the Culture Project, and La Mama.
Directing work includes over 30 productions in various venues including the Atlantic Theater Company, Seattle Rep, the Huntington Theater Company, Theater for a New Audience, ICA (London), Warsaw Theater Festival, Moscow Arts Theater School, the City Theater (Iceland) A.R.T. Institute, and theatre schools in New York, the Netherlands, and Greenland.
Work ranges from classics such as Romeo and Juliet, The Bacchae, The Seagull and Miss Julie to contemporary plays The Swan, Fool for Love, The Mud Angel, Footfalls, as well as several original plays and devised pieces. His production of O, Pioneers! with Mary McDonnell was televised nationally by American Playhouse PBS. His play Winesberg: Small Town Life was produced at the Perseverance Theater. He has taught master acting and directing classes in Cuba, Iceland, England, Switzerland, Holland, Austria, Denmark, Germany, Greenland and in several American Universities and training programs including CalArts, Naropa, A.R.T, University of Wisconsin, Yale, and Playwrights Horizons.
He has served as a mentor for the Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Lab. He was the director of the Experimental Theatre Wing at Tisch Drama from 1991-2001 where he produced more than 100 productions. He was also chair of the Drama Department from 2001-2008. He is the founder and director of the Tisch International Theatre Summer Training program in Amsterdam and the Tisch spring actor training program in NYU Berlin.
STEPHANIE OMENS
Theatre & Therapy
Stephanie Omens is a Licensed Creative Arts Therapist, and Mental Health Counselor, Registered Drama Therapist, Board Certified, and Certified Child Life Specialist. Stephanie Omens is in private practice having previously worked in the hospital setting with medically compromised children whose lives are affected by hospitalized circumstances. She has been an adjunct instructor at New York University, since 2005. Explaining to children complicated bereavement is her research and upcoming publication, Fall 2023 by Rutledge Press, Drama Therapy And the Bereaved Child: Telling The Truth To Children About Death and Dying.
JOHN OSBURN
Studies in Shakespeare: On Film
John is Associate Director of CONNECT, a theatre-based communication training program at the Cooper Union. He has taught at Vassar College and New School University, served on the literary and outreach staff of the Denver Center Theatre Company, and worked as an arts editor, critic, and director.
LYNN SALLY
Topics in Peformance Studies: Performing Gender: Camp, Drag & Burlesque
Dr. Sally received her PhD from the Performance Studies Department at New York University and her MA in Gender Studies and Feminist Theory from The New School. Her primary areas of research interest include American popular culture, gender, and performance. Her work has been published by Routledge Press and in peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Journal of Popular Culture, Senses & Society, New York History, and others. Currently on sabbatical, she is completing a book-length academic monograph for Lexington Press tentatively titled Neo-Burlesque as a New Sexual Revolution: Performances of Gender, Excess, and Desire.
COREY F. SULLIVAN
The Villain
Corey Sullivan is an artist, teacher, and producer working internationally in theater and film. He holds degrees from Bard College, Moscow Art Theater, and Harvard University, where he was also a Teaching Fellow. As Research Associate at New York University Abu Dhabi, he taught and trained in theatrical forms all over the Middle East and South East Asia, including the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, India, Nepal, Thailand, Indonesia, and Japan. He has also been an invited guest lecturer at Bard College, Southern Methodist University, the United States Embassy in Egypt, the Indian Embassy in the UAE, and several international theater festivals. He is currently Adjunct Professor at New York University Tisch School of the Arts in the Undergraduate Theatre Studies Department and Graduate Film Program.
Since 2001 he has been an Associate Artist of Theater Mitu, with whom he has been a resident artist at the Sundance Institute, New York Theater Workshop, and the Watermill Center. He has performed at the Public Theater, New York Shakespeare Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Vineyard Theater, New Victory Theater, American Repertory Theater, Williamstown Theater Festival, Powerhouse Theater, Los Angeles Theatre Center, and the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans. His international credits include the Moscow Art Theater and the Chekhov Estate in Russia, the Kontakt Theater Festival in Poland, the Cairo International Festival of Contemporary and Experimental Theater in Egypt, and Teatro Duoc UC in Santiago, Chile.