Titles and contact information are displayed below. Click on a section heading or use tabs at left to see all listings for that section. Click on individual names to see complete biographies.
Mindy Cooper has directed, choreographed and performed on Broadway and Off-Broadway in Chicago - The Musical (original revival), Titanic (original cast), Dracula – The Musical, 50 Shades – The Musical Parody, Mars/Venus Live, The Eternal Space, Soul Doctor, Wrong Mountain, Five Course Love, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Song & Dance, and Tenderloin, as well as TV’s Law & Order: Criminal Intent.
History of Rhetoric and PerformancePh.D. Adviser, Theatre and DanceMaster Adviser, Performance Studies Program
Lynette Hunter has written and edited over 30 books on a wide range of subjects, as well as creating and touring performance installations in the U.S. and abroad.
M.F.A. Classical Theatre, The George Washington University at The Shakespeare TheatreB.S. Interdepartmental Studies, School of Speech, Northwestern University
Margaret Laurena Kemp has appeared on regional and international stages including Arena Stage, Mark Taper Forum, Yale Rep, South Coast Repertory, La Mama Theatre (Melbourne, Australia), Theatre of Changes (Athens, Greece), Red Pear Theatre (Antibes, France), and The Magnet Theatre (Cape Town, South Africa).
Costume Design: Stage and ScreenM.F.A., Design, Yale School of Drama
Maggie Morgan is a costume designer for stage and screen. Her recent work includes a Broadway musical, feature and short films and several productions at California theaters.
Ph.D. Duke University, 1999B.A. University of Cincinnati, Phi Beta KappaPerformance Studies
Jon D. Rossini is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC Davis where he teaches courses in Theatre and Dance History, Ethnicity/Race in Performance, Performance Writing, Playwriting, and Theories of Performance.
M.F.A., Technical Design and Production, Yale School of Drama
Steven Schmidt is a Davis native and the Technical Director for California Shakespeare Theatre. Over the past ten years he has worked as the Associate Head of Production for Yale Repertory Theatre, a freelance Technical Director for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and the Technical Director for B Street Theatre. He is a co-author of Structural Design for the Stage – 2nd Edition. He was also a founding member of Barnyard Theatre.
Keith Hennessy is an independent artist-scholar-activist-teacher dancing in and around live performance. Born in northern Ontario, he lives in San Francisco since 1982 and tours internationally. His performances engage improvisation, ritual, collaboration, and protest as tools for investigating political realities.
Dr. Alex Boyd graduated from the University of California at Davis Graduate Program in Performance Studies in June 2014. His dissertation, “The Sustainability of Traditional Knowledge Systems: Embodied Learning through Practice, Teaching and Application,” draws on 20 years of professional practice and teaching in Daoist Qigong arts (Daojiao Lishi Quanfa) that he has studied since 1985 with his main teachers Chee Soo (who passed in 1994) and Desmond Murray.
Stuart Carroll is the Artistic Director of the Sacramento-based Capitol Ballet Company. He has presented The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, Giselle, Paquita, La Bayadère, andDon Quixoteto local audiences and the surrounding communities with support and funding from the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission and the California Arts Council.
Ms. Cavanaugh has choreographed for Oregon Shakespeare Festival (for five seasons as choreographer and actor), Berkeley Repertory Theatre, The New Victory Theater, Yale Repertory Theatre, Cincinnati Playhouse, Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, Brisbane Arts Festival, La Mama E.T.C., Aurora Theatre Company, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Lincoln Center Directors Lab, San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, TheatreWorks, Shakespeare at Stinson, Mills College Rep, and Summerfest Dance and California Shakespeare Theater (where she is an Associate Artist) for 17 seasons.
Michele Apriña Leavy is a professional actor and theatre educator. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, she has performed locally with such companies as the American Conservatory Theater, Alameda Civic Ballet, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Center Repertory Company, California Conservatory Theater, Livermore Shakespeare Festival, Marin Theatre Company, and TheatreWorks, among others. In farther locales, she has appeared with Theatre Key West (Florida), The Elephant Theatre Company (Los Angeles) and Theatre167 (New York City).
Bobbie Wynn Bolden, UC Davis Department of Theatre & Dance professor and the godmother of the university’s dance program, retired in 2003 after 18 years of teaching. She will always be remembered for dancing to the beat of her own drummer.
William E. Kleb taught theatre history, critical theory and playwriting in the Department of Theatre & Dance from 1974 to 1994, when he retired. During that time, he served on numerous department and university administrative committees and chaired the graduate program.
Thomas J. Munn, an internationally recognized Lighting Designer, has designed for theatre, opera, ballet, television, videos and industrials. A graduate of Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts in Design, he made his Broadway debut in 1974 designing scenery for Brightowerby Dore Schary.
Barbara Sellers-Young taught movement, acting and Asian theatre at the Department of Theatre & Dance from 1993 to 2008. She served on various university committees at UC Davis, taught as a member of the Davis Honors program and was Chair of Theatre & Dance from summer 2001 through spring 2006. She also served as Interim Executive Director of the Mondavi Center from April 2005 until June 2006.
Theatre Department Chair, 1956–1989Ph.D., Stanford University
Ted Shank was the Founding Chair of the Theatre Department at UC Davis and taught in the department 33 years, from 1956–1989. He then transferred to the UC San Diego Theatre Department where his wife, UC Davis alumna Adele Edling Shank, was Department Chair. Shank was promoted to Distinguished Professor of Theatre and taught in the department until retiring.
All TAs and AIs teaching classes in the Department of Theatre & Dance are listed here. Some are department MFA students (Dramatic Arts), while others are Ph.D. students in Performance Studies (an interdisciplinary Graduate Group). Visit the Performance Studies website for more information.
B.A. Theatre and Dance, James Madison University, 2006
Isa is a performing artist and somatic researcher who has worked for over a decade with movement/dance modalities and experimental theatre techniques that promote self reflection. Through her developing methodology, Dialoguing the Unconscious, and her Ph.D research, she is investigating the question: How do we share/acknowledge knowledge that can’t (in a “regular” way) be seen? She is deeply invested in pre-colonized ways of knowing.
California State University, Sacramento, B.A. Dance, May 2013
Diego Martinez-Campos is a Mexican performing artist, choreographer, and movement educator currently based in Sacramento, CA. He strongly believes that art has the power to enrich, transform, and change people’s lives through play, collaboration, and education. To know more about Diego, visit www.creatifcreature.com
Tasa Gleason holds a BFA in Dance Performance from Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle WA, and a certificate in Apparel Design and Merchandising from College of Alameda, Alameda CA. She has been designing and creating costumes for dance and theatre for over 15 years. Having a background in performance and choreography offers Tasa an understanding of what is unique about costuming for dance and theater, it also means that she shares a vocabulary in regards to movement that is indispensable to her when collaborating with directors, choreographers and dancers.
M.A., Devised Theatre, Dartington College of Arts, Falmouth University, EnglandB.A., Theatre, Barnard College, Columbia University, New York City
Sarah Ashford Hart is a socially engaged performance practitioner, scholar and educator from a Canadian-Venezuelan-American family background. Over the past 12 years she has developed her arts practice in Russia, England, Venezuela, Chile and the US. Her work explores participatory techniques for generating social dialogue across barriers of cultural difference, by creating multilingual spaces to explore the mutability of ‘belonging’ and ‘community’.
Ante’s interest as an academic researcher in the domain of circus is in acts, events, shows, and performances that offer a unique set of possibilities to widen perception of circus; what and who it encompasses, its politics. Currently, he is investigating the animal-human relationship in traditional and contemporary circus. Most of his career as a performer and choreographer has taken place in the field of New Circus. Ante visited the circus school in Brussels (ESAC) and Berlin (Die Etage) and Moscow.
North Park University, B.A., Communication Arts: Theatre and Performance Studies, 2006
Joseph Schupbach is a director, deviser, and playwright. Joseph has been a company member of Barrel of Monkeys since 2007 and served as Artistic Director 2014-2017.
Lena Polzonetti is a dancer, choreographer, and dance educator. She has performed professionally in ballet and modern dance companies, including the Ithaca Ballet, alban elved dance company, Danza Tersicore, and Fischerdance, among others. From 2006 to 2017 she coordinated and taught in the magnet dance program at Clay High School for the Visual and Performing Arts in South Bend, Indiana.
Humboldt State University, B.A. Interdisciplinary Dance: Language and Culture, 2007
Kevin Dockery is a physical thinker, mover, musician, writer and nature historian who uses performance to explore ideas of self, place, and fit in the cultural labyrinth that overlays our experience of life.
Tom Burmester founded the Los Angeles Theatre Ensemble in 2004, where he served as Artistic Director. He also presided over the historic Powerhouse Theatre as Managing Director during the Ensemble’s tenure (2008- 2011).
Deepa Mahadevan is a classical Indian dancer and the Founder/Artistic Director of Tiruchitrambalam School of dance, Union City,CA. She is interested in examining the role of gender, caste, sex, class and religion in the form and content of the dance form Bharatnatyam, a South Indian neoclassical dance form. Her research interest proceeds to delve into the transmission of this dance to second generation immigrant students, especially in the context of the North American Diaspora.
Lisa Quoresimo is Assistant Professor of Musical Theatre at Southern Utah University. She is an internationally produced composer and playwright, and an active director and performer.
Eric’s artmaking, clinical work and academic research are organized around the material aesthetics of psychoanalysis. He is in private practice in Davis and San Francisco, and his project is an aesthetic (mis)translation of developmental attachment theory into a feminist materialist revision of the psychoanalytic project.
Ekaterina Zharinova, a PhD student in Performance Studies from Russia, was a Fulbright scholar at the SUNY Purchase Dance Conservatory, who received her masters in dance from the GWU in 2017. From 2000 to 2005, she danced with the Provincial Dances Theatre in Yekaterinburg, Russia, touring across the country and abroad. Since 2006, she has been creating work independently and in collaborations to present her choreography nationally and internationally.
The department of Theatre & Dance offers studies leading to the Master of Fine Arts degree in Dramatic Art. See the Graduate Program section for detailed information. Current MFA students are listed below.
Humboldt State University, B.A. Interdisciplinary Dance: Language and Culture, 2007
Kevin Dockery is a physical thinker, mover, musician, writer and nature historian who uses performance to explore ideas of self, place, and fit in the cultural labyrinth that overlays our experience of life.
Tasa Gleason holds a BFA in Dance Performance from Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle WA, and a certificate in Apparel Design and Merchandising from College of Alameda, Alameda CA. She has been designing and creating costumes for dance and theatre for over 15 years. Having a background in performance and choreography offers Tasa an understanding of what is unique about costuming for dance and theater, it also means that she shares a vocabulary in regards to movement that is indispensable to her when collaborating with directors, choreographers and dancers.
California State University, Sacramento, B.A. Dance, May 2013
Diego Martinez-Campos is a Mexican performing artist, choreographer, and movement educator currently based in Sacramento, CA. He strongly believes that art has the power to enrich, transform, and change people’s lives through play, collaboration, and education. To know more about Diego, visit www.creatifcreature.com
Lena Polzonetti is a dancer, choreographer, and dance educator. She has performed professionally in ballet and modern dance companies, including the Ithaca Ballet, alban elved dance company, Danza Tersicore, and Fischerdance, among others. From 2006 to 2017 she coordinated and taught in the magnet dance program at Clay High School for the Visual and Performing Arts in South Bend, Indiana.
North Park University, B.A., Communication Arts: Theatre and Performance Studies, 2006
Joseph Schupbach is a director, deviser, and playwright. Joseph has been a company member of Barrel of Monkeys since 2007 and served as Artistic Director 2014-2017.
Cal State University, Fullerton, B.A. Theatre Design and Production, 2016
Lindsay Putnam has worked as Head of Audio at Disneyland’s Fantasyland Theatre and as a sound designer for Chemical Imbalance: a Jekyll and Hyde Play (regional finalist for KCACTF), Footloose, Reckless and The Laramie Project. At UC Davis she has designed Gibraltar, The 39 Steps, Elements, The Briars, The Trojan Women, The Shape of Things, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, NAM WAR RAW MAN and Outside the Lines.
Regina Gutierrez is a multidisciplinary artist and theater educator expert on movement, training and energy work. Specialist in the area of movement and physical theater, she has been formed in Corporal Mime, Acrobatics and Scenic Combat. She has participated in numerous productions as an actress and assistant director and is a founding member of the group Entrópico Teatro in which she has been an actress and assistant director since 2007.
Justin Streichman is an actor and performance maker from Los Angeles with a background in experimental theater, improvisational modes of dance, independent film, and performance art.
Danika Sudik is an Ovation-nominated director, actor, and teaching artist from Los Angeles. She has worked on the War Cycle as a Corps Artist of the Los Angeles Theatre Ensemble since 2008.
B.S. American History, Northwestern University 2000
Lucas Hatton served as Artistic Director of Chicago’s Barrel of Monkeys and directed hundreds of original performances of the company’s critically acclaimed show That’s Weird, Grandma. He directed Incident at Vichy with Steep Theater and Foolin’ Around with Infinity with Phalanx Theater, both of which received Critic’s Choice in Chicago Reader. He also directed the sketch group Southern Mothers at Second City Donny’s Skybox.
Recently at the College of Southern Nevada he played Emil in Jeffery Hatcher’s Three Viewings, Mike Talman in Wait Until Dark and co-directed Reefer Madness. He just finished his fifth year teaching theatre to high school and Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) (herself) and Dracula (Mrs. Westenra) at Acalanes High School.
A native of rural New England and graduate of Reed College in Oregon, Darren Blaney is a teacher, essayist, playwright, solo performer, actor, and director. He graduated with a PhD in Dramatic Art with a graduate minor in Critical Theory from UC Davis in 2009. His doctoral dissertation was entitled: ”Staging the Social and Cruising the Crisis: A Genealogy of Utopian Aspiration in U.S. Queer Theater from the 1960s to the Present.”
taught theatre at the International School of Brussels, Belgium for the first six months after graduation, then took a one-semester job teaching acting and improv at South Lake Tahoe Community College. He landed a role in Foothill Theatre Company’s two-person comedy A Tuna Christmas, moved to Los Angeles in fall 2000 and worked for the Sundance Institute’s Feature Film Program. Although Sundance is best known for its Film Festival, it is appreciated in the independent film community for its film program.
lives in Kenwood, CA. She is a full-time faculty member in Theatre Arts at Santa Rosa Junior College where she directed the world premiere of Watermelon Nights, adapted from the Greg Sarris’ novel. Leslie directed The Kitchen Side of the Door, Word for Word Theatre Company’s holiday show at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. Leslie has also acted with the California Shakespeare Festival, Marin Theatre Company, Intersection for the Arts, TheatreWorks, Shakespeare at the Beach, and the Willows, among others.
owns the American Blues Theatre, 2337 Pacific Avenue on the Miracle Mile in Stockton, CA.. This spring Harvey plays George in the American Blues Theatre Company’s production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
Sue Murphy (BA 1979)
Now living in Los Angeles, was nominated for a 2001 American Comedy Award for Best Female Standup. She has appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, HBO, and many times on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Catch her act in her own half-hour comedy special on Comedy Central.
Former UC Davis professor of theatre and dance, costume design, Phyllis J. Kress of Sacramento, California, passed away on Sunday, July 10, 2016, at 77 years of age. Kress retired in 1998 after 32 years at UC Davis.
The following obituary was written in 2011 by Elin Diamond, professor of English and director of the Graduate Program in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. Diamond, who specializes in feminist criticism and dramatic theory, earned her doctorate and master’s degree at UC Davis. See the New York Times obituary here.
Della Davidson was a vital creative force for the Department of Theatre and Dance for over ten years and was a central figure in the Bay Area dance world since the early 1980s. She has been described as one of the West Coast’s most fluent writers for the body, a dance maker of works that ruminate with poignancy and beauty on topics ranging from a woman’s anger to disease, death and the fragility of human existence. Her work echoed with references to the United States tradition in modern dance, and yet her dancers perform with a passionate abandonment of commitment and rage.
Robin Gray, Production Stage Manager, has worked, locally, for Music Circus, B Street Theater, Capital Stage and for the Sacramento Theater Company. She worked on Hugh Jackman’s pre-Broadway show at the Curran in San Francisco in 2012. She last toured for Kansas City Starlight with Hello Dolly starring Michele Lee. Regionally, she stage-managed Phantom of the Opera in San Francisco. Before moving to Sacramento, Ms.
