Guest Artists 2011-2012
Michael Kiley
Spring 2012, Sound Designer, Production Ensemble
Michael Kiley is a Philadelphia based sound designer, composer, voice teacher and musician working in theatre and dance. He has created original work with 1812 Productions, Flashpoint Theater, Theatre Exile, Luna Theater Company, The National Constitution Center, SubCircle, Brat Productions, Rowan University and Nichole Canuso Dance Company, of which he is a company member. Michael is also the founder of The Mural and The Mint, a free music project dedicated to non traditional recordings and performances. The Mural and The Mint premiered their first full length work, As The Eyes of the Seahorse, at HERE Arts Center in SoHo last Winter. He is one of the recipients of the 2012 Live Arts Brewery Fellowship, a year long residency program at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, and a graduate of Artists U, a program for enriching and bettering the lives of artists.
Adrienne Mackey '04
Spring 2012, Director, Dramaturgy Thesis
Adrienne Mackey is a director who creates original and compelling theater using the power of the human voice and the forms of the human body. She is the head of Swim Pony Performing Arts for which she conceived and directed SURVIVE! in 2010 - a 22,000 sq foot performance installation examining the role of humanity in the universe. The following year she created Lady M - an all female spectacle of original music and movement based on Shakespeare's Macbeth for the 2011 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. Her work covers areas ranging from pop culture (Purr, Pull, Reign with Johnny Showcase) American history (Owning Up to the Corn and The Ballad of Joe Hill), classic literature (The Master and Margarita at Mum Puppettheatre) and racial tensions within her hometown of Philadelphia (Recitatif, Philadelphia Live Arts Festival 2007). In Philadelphia she has received a 2010 Live Arts Brewery Fellowship and in 2006-2007 she was awarded the CEC's New Edge Residency in Theater. Adrienne's study of alternative voice has taken her to France's Roy Hart Voice Centre on a 2008 Independence Foundation Fellowship. She also teaches voice as a professor at Drexel University and sings backup vocals as one half of "The Truth" with Johnny Showcase and The Lefty Lucy Cabaret. Watch for her upcoming work with a remounted Lady M coming to the Annenberg Center's in 2012-2013 season www.swimpony.org.
Sarah Sanford '99
Spring 2012, Acting I Faculty
Sarah Sanford is a free-lance actor, director, and teaching artist based in Philadelphia. She has been a Pig Iron Theatre Company member for 9 years and is on the core faculty at Pig Iron's new Institute for Advanced Performance Training, located in Philadelphia. With Pig Iron, Sarah has co-created and performed in eight original works including Obie award-winning Hell Meets Henry Halfway, and the 2011 Live Arts hit, Twelfth Night. As an actor Sarah works primarily in Philadelphia but has also toured to New York, San Francisco, Vancouver, Edinburgh, London, Ukraine, Ireland, Jordan, Poland, Norway, and Lithuania. Sarah's directing work includes Makoto Hirano's one-man show Boom Bap Tourism, Appetite (winner of the Crow's Theatre Best Emerging Director award, Toronto 2007), and productions of Old Times and Three Tall Women at Swarthmore College. In 2010 she was honored with the F. Otto Haas award for "Best Emerging Philadelphia Theatre Artist." Sarah studied directing at Swarthmore and went on to the 2-year program at École Jacques Lecoq in Paris.
Alex Torra
Spring 2012, Director, Acting Thesis
Alex Torra is a Philadelphia-based director and performer whose work focuses on ensemble-generated, original performance and contemporary interpretations of classics. He is an Associate Artist with Pig Iron Theatre Company, where he has worked as a Performer in Twelfth Night, Cankerblossom, Welcome to Yuba City, Pay Up, 365 Days/365 Plays, and Anodyne; as Assistant Director on Chekhov Lizardbrain and Sweet By-and-By; and as Director of Come to my Awesome Fiesta, it's Going to be Awesome, Okay? He also serves as the Resident Director for the Philadelphia ensemble Team Sunshine Performance Corporation, for which he directed Punchkapow, and with whom he is developing a handful of new works, including Zombie Defense Consultation, Project Silent Asian, and Cityscape. Alex has also worked closely with Shakespeare in Clark Park over the last few years, directing Much Ado About Nothing and Comedy of Errors. His work with classical text has included linguistic work on "Original Pronunciation", the dialect in which Shakespeare's plays were originally performed. Last year, Alex served as a Fellow at the Philadelphia Live Arts Brewery, where he began the development of a self-produced piece entitled The Sincerity Project. He has received the Grace Le Vine Theatre Award from the Princess Grace Foundation as well as fellowships from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and NY's Drama League. He received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and his M.F.A. in Directing from Brown University.
Rebecca Wright
Spring 2012, Director, Solo Performance Thesis
Rebecca Wright is a director and dramaturg. Her directing credits include Larry Loebell's The Ballad of John Wesley Reed, Philadelphia Young Playwrights/InterAct Theatre Company's Young Voices, The War Party at InterAct, Love Jerry with Nice People Theatre Company, and the reading of Kara Lee Corthron's Etched in Skin on a Sunlit Night at PlayPenn. She also directs and devises site-specific, installation, and parallel narrative performance pieces with her company, Applied Mechanics. Their works include Selkie: A Homemade Play, It's Hard Times at the Camera Blanca, Inside Julia Child, Ses Voyages Sauvages, and Portmantea, which debuted at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival 2010. This fall she will collaborate with Philadelphia actor and performance artist Justin Jain on his new project, shift/transfer. Rebecca has worked with students at Temple University, Swarthmore College, and the University of Michigan. She holds an MA in Performance and Culture from the University of London. She is the Literary Director and Resident Dramaturg at InterAct.
