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, and Don
Quixote to 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.
Jennifer Grace received her BA from Kansas State University in
1997. She has been working as a professional actor since, most
notably in a record-shattering run as Emily Webb in Tony
award-winning director David Cromer’s critically acclaimed
production of OUR TOWN, which she performed in Chicago, New York
and Los Angeles, opposite actors such as Michael Shannon, Helen
Hunt and Michael McKean, and for which she was recognized with a
Theatre World Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway debut.
Universidad Finis Terrae, B.F.A., TheaterUniversidad Finis Terrae, B.A., Education
Verónica Díaz-Muñíz is a Chilean director, playwright and theater
educator with a background in the area of movement and
testimonial theater. Her work engages with questions of gender
and womanhood, and her creations evolve from a particularly
feminist perspective. She is a founding member of “Toma Teatro”
in which she has served as director and playwright since 2015.
Her research aims to create alternative theatrical spaces and
practices where liminality converges with the political.
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.
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.
Universidad Finis Terrae, B.F.A., TheaterUniversidad Finis Terrae, B.A., Education
Verónica Díaz-Muñíz is a Chilean director, playwright and theater
educator with a background in the area of movement and
testimonial theater. Her work engages with questions of gender
and womanhood, and her creations evolve from a particularly
feminist perspective. She is a founding member of “Toma Teatro”
in which she has served as director and playwright since 2015.
Her research aims to create alternative theatrical spaces and
practices where liminality converges with the political.
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.
Jennifer Grace received her BA from Kansas State University in
1997. She has been working as a professional actor since, most
notably in a record-shattering run as Emily Webb in Tony
award-winning director David Cromer’s critically acclaimed
production of OUR TOWN, which she performed in Chicago, New York
and Los Angeles, opposite actors such as Michael Shannon, Helen
Hunt and Michael McKean, and for which she was recognized with a
Theatre World Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway debut.
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
Alumni from the Theatre and Dance Department work all over the
world in film, television, theatre, industry, education, and arts
administration. Our alumni are very important to us, so keep in
touch! If your contact information changes, please send us an
update using our Alumni update form. We send our department
newsletter to all alumni each fall. Please let us know what you
are up to by June of each year so we can include your news.
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.
