Miriam Seidel - librettist: Miriam Seidel is a writer with a background in visual art and music. Her dramatic works have been performed by InterAct Theatre and broadcast on New American Radio, and she is at work on a new opera project with composer Kamran Ince with a premiere planned in Boston in 2008. Her short fiction has appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Washington Square, Phoebe, First Intensity and elsewhere. Her writing on visual art, dance and new performance has appeared in many publications, including Art in America (where she is corresponding editor), ARTnews, Art on Paper, Dance, High Performance, the Philadelphia Inquirer and others; she has also written numerous catalogue essays for exhibitions here and abroad. She is curator of the Galleries at the Gershman Y, an arts and culture center in Philadelphia.
Terry O'Reilly- director: Terry O'Reilly has been a Co-Artistic Director of Mabou Mines since 1973 and is a veteran of over 25 productions with that company as an actor, director, designer, writer, and puppeteer. He has performed in and directed productions in the United States, Latin America, Europe and Asia. His own play, Animal Magnetism, with director Lee Breuer and composer Eve Beglarian, premiered at Arts at St Ann's in 2000, and traveled to the Czech Republic's festival DIVADLO in 2001. Other theater works incorporating original music include Henry Miller's The Angel is My Watermark with music by Carter Burwell, and O'Reilly's own The Bribe, with music by John Zorn, performed in New York, Singapore and Brazil. He directied the martial arts opera Voice of the Dragon part II, with composer Fred Ho, writer Ruth Margraff and the Afro Asian Music Ensemble, at the Apollo Theater in 2004.
Ana Zorana Brajović - conductor: Ana Zorana Brajović is a Conductor with the Opera of the National Theater of Belgrade, a post she has held since the age of 18. Before the age of 20, she also gave her first piano recital at the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts; was awarded prizes in competitions in Belgrade and Stresa, Italy; and received the annual October Award, the highest award in Belgrade for music achievement. As a Fulbright Scholar, she studied with Gustav Meier at the Peabody Conservatory, during which she performed in a Millennium Stage Concert at the Kennedy Center. For the National Theater Opera House in Belgrade, she has conducted the operas of Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, Bizet, Donizetti, Strauss and others.
Boris Čakširan – set and costume design: : Boris Čakširan is a choreographer and costume designer based in Belgrade, Serbia. He has worked as a costume designer for over 25 years, and is considered one of Serbia’s foremost costume designers for stage, film and television. In the past ten years he has become more involved as a director/choreographer, culminating in his founding of ERGstatus, an award-winning contemporary dance project. His work with ERGstatus reflects his belief in the arts as a healing factor in the human community. He has worekd in dance education in leading institutions and at festivals in Israel, Poland, and Italy. His many international awards include one of the first CEC-ArtsLink fellowships, leading to collaborative performance projects with many CEC-ArtsLink fellows and organizations including GOH Productions, the American-Czechoslovak Marionette Puppet Theatre and the Silesian Dance Theatre of Poland.
Sarah Drury - media designer: Sarah Drury is a new media artist whose work explores the charged boundary between interior impulse and physical expression, most recently by means of responsive interfaces and dynamically-generated media. Her installations, including The Listening Microphone, Voicebox, Vocalalia and Intervention Chants, explore the expressive qualities of the voice in interaction with video and sound. Her work has been presented in national and international venues including SIGGRAPH 2005, ISEA 2002, ACM Multimedia '98, Performative Sites 2001, the Brooklyn Museum, the Kitchen, Artists Space, Hallwalls, The Philadelphia Fringe Festival, The Worldwide Video Festival at the Hague and on PBS. She has received an NEA grant for her current project, The eVokability, to mount a performance based on custom-designed wearable devices as augmented expressive tools for performers with disabilities.
Jen Simmons - media designer: Jen Simmons is a multimedia designer and filmmaker. Her films Bush for Peace and Inclinations have screened at hundreds of festival venues including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Resfest, Media That Matters Film Festival, Festival of New Film and Media: Split, Croatia, Inside Out: Toronto, NewFest: New York, Frameline: San Francisco and Free Speech TV. She has designed projection, lighting, scenic and sound for over 300 shows including for Peggy Shaw, Sharon Bridgforth, Lourdes Pérez, Daniel Alexander Jones, Gloria Anzaldúa, Beto Araiza, Sandra Cisneros, Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, and Cherríe Moraga. From 1992 -2000, Jen was a key force at the Esperanza Center in San Antonio, Tejas, a multidisciplinary performance gallery and thinktank for innovative arts and progressive action. She is currently developing a new film, Ancestor English, about English colonialism, trauma, her family, and possibilities for healing.
Nina Winthrop – choreographer: As Artistic Director of her own company, Nina Winthrop and Dancers, Nina Winthrop has choreographed numerous dance works since 1992. Winthrop is committed to multimedia collaborations, and has worked with musician/ composers John Cale, Steve Sacks, Jon Gibson and Gary Lucas; set designers David Auden and Manuel Lutgenhorst; sculptor Jene Highstein; costume designers Anita Evenepoel and Naoko Nagata; filmmakers Morleigh Steinberg and Maria Antelman; and lighting designers Spencer Mosse and Oguri, among others. As a dancer, she performed with Wendy Perron, Susan Rethorst, Yoshiko Chuma, Sally Silvers and Kei Takei, and studied with Erick Hawkins, Merce Cunningham and Deborah Hay. This year Ms. Winthrop is the curator of Dance Conversations at The Flea. Her company’s season will take place at Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church in June 2006.
Mary Louise Geiger – lighting design: Mary Louise Geiger’s recent productions include The Constant Wife at Broadway’s American Airlines Theatre, and Mabou Mines’ Dollhouse at Arts at St. Anne’s. She also created the lighting design for Tongue of a Bird at the New York Shakespeare Festival, Jody Oberfelder Dance at Lincoln Center’s Clark Theater, and Oedipus at Palm Springs at New York Theater Project; and has worked regionally at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum, the Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Actor’s Theatre of Louisville. Geiger is Associate Arts Professor and Associate Chair of Design at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Jorge Cousineau – sound design: Jorge Cousineau has been active in Philadelphia's theater and dance world, designing sets, lights and sounds as well as composing music for companies such as Group Motion, Rennie Harris Puremovement, SCRAP Performance Group, COURT, Pig Iron Theatre, 1812 Productions and the Arden Theatre. Together with his wife Niki Cousineau he directs Subcircle, a dance company focusing on site specific performances.
