Longwood Project Artist Bios

Hank Murta Adams is the Studio Creative Director at Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center where he facilitates numerous individual and collective projects for a diverse artist community, while serving as an educator and mentor for numerous young artists working as assistants and interns. He has been awarded three Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and was the recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship Award from the New York State Arts Council. He was awarded a Fellowship at the Creative Glass Center of America in 2001 and is a member of the Creative Glass Center of America Advisory Board. His work has been featured in numerous one-man exhibitions ranging from J&L Lobmeyr Glass in Vienna, Austria; Remnant: Hank Adams, at The Arts Center of the Capital Region, Troy, NY; the Elliot Brown Gallery in Seattle; Heller Gallery in NYC, the Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI and the Hunterdon Museum of Art in NJ. Adams’ work was also selected for Creativity and Collaboration: Pilchuck Glass School at 30 in Seattle, WA, in 2000. Other group shows range from the triennial traveling exhibition Americans in Glass to World Glass Now, held in 1988 at the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Sapporo, Japan; and the Glass Skin, a traveling exhibit organized by the Corning Museum of Glass.

Wilson Chin has designed sets at People’s Light & Theatre for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Gossamer, and Nathan the Wise. Broadway: Next Fall. Off-B’way: Masked (Daryl Roth Theatre), 10 things to do before I die, Len Asleep in Vinyl and The Dear Boy (Second Stage), Dark Matters (Rattlestick Theatre), Boom (Ars Nova), King of Shadows (Working Theatre), Christine Jorgensen Reveals (New World Stages). Opera: Lucia di Lammermoor (Lyric Opera of Chicago), Eine Florentinische Tragodie and Gianni Schicchi (Canadian Opera Company), The Saint of Bleecker Street (Central City Opera), and Don Giovanni (San Francisco Opera Merola). Regional: ACT, Barrington Stage, Geva Theatre, Hangar Theater, Hartford Stage, Indiana Rep, The Old Globe, Portland Stage, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Signature Theatre, Trinity Rep, Studio Arena, Two River Theatre, Weston Playhouse, Westport Country Playhouse, Yale Rep. Education: Yale School of Drama (M.F.A. in Drama), UC Berkeley (B.A. in Architecture). www.wilsonchin.com

Lisa D’Amour writes plays for theaters and creates interdisciplinary performance. Her play Detroit will be produced by Steppenwolf Theater in their 2010-11 season, directed by Austin Pendleton. Lisa often makes interdisciplinary work with her collaborator, Katie Pearl. Currently, they are creating How to Build a Forest, a performance installation that will premiere at The Kitchen in New York City in June 2011. Lisa’s work has been presented by theaters such as Salvage Vanguard, Infernal Bridegroom Productions, the Walker Arts Center, Crowded Fire Theater, Children's Theater Company, Clubbed Thumb, HERE Arts Center, New Georges, Theater of a Two-Headed Calf, and the Women's Project, and has been supported by the Jerome Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, NYSCA, the MAP Fund, Creative Capital, and the NEA/TCG Residency for Playwrights. She received an OBIE Award along with Katie Pearl and Kathy Randels for Nita & Zita, and received the Alpert Award in the Arts for theater in 2008. Lisa often collaborates with ArtSpot Productions in her hometown of New Orleans. She is core alum of the Playwrights’ Center and a recent alumna of New Dramatists. www.lisadamour.com and www.pearldamour.com

Russell Davis is currently a 2008-10 recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. He was resident playwright at People's Light for the Theatre Residency Program of the National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group. He has received grants and fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, McKnight Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and Tennessee Arts Commission. His plays have been published by Broadway Play Publishing, Dramatists Play Service, Baker's Plays, and Toneeluitgeverij Vink B.V. in the Netherlands. Selections from plays have been published in Smith & Kraus' Great Scenes for Young Actors (Volume II), in The Best Women's Stage Monologues and The Best Men's Stage Monologues for 1991, 1992, 2003 and 2008, and in Penguin Books' 100 Monologues -- An Audition Sourcebook from New Dramatists. Two monologues from his new play, Mahida's Extra Key to Heaven, will be published in Smith & Kraus' Best Woman's Stage Monologues of 2010 and Best Men's Stage Monologues of 2010.

Rachel Dickstein is a writer, director, teacher and founding Artistic Director of Ripe Time, a company devoted to new ensemble-based performance works infused with rich language, visual power and physical rigor. For Ripe Time, she has devised, choreographed and directed the world premieres of Fire Throws (based on Sophocles’ Antigone) at 3LD Art and Technology Center, Betrothed (based on texts by Jhumpa Lahiri, Chekhov, and Ansky) and Innocents (based on Wharton's The House of Mirth and adapted with Emily Morse) at the Ohio Theatre. Other Ripe Time projects include The Secret of Steep Ravines at P.S. 122, The Holy Mother of Hadley New York by Barbara Wiechmann and co-produced with New Georges at the Ohio Theatre, and The Palace at 4 A.M. (based on works by Edgar Allan Poe and Sophie Calle) at HERE Arts Center. Other recent directing projects include Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd's In What Language? at the Asia Society, Redcat and Pica; and Ellen McLaughlin's version of The Trojan Women at Fordham University. Rachel has created and directed other new works for New York Theatre Workshop, New Georges, New York Shakespeare Festival/Joe's Pub, and Seattle's Annex Theatre. She has served as a Resident Director at New Dramatists and Assistant Director to Martha Clarke nationally and internationally. She is currently developing Septimus and Clarissa, an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway by Ellen McLaughlin and recently mounted a workshop of this piece at CSC/13th Street Theatre. NEA/TCG CDP, Drama League Fellow, Yale College, B.A.

Marsha Ginsberg works in the interdisciplinary overlap between scenic design for theater and opera, installation art and photography. She studied theater design at NYU Tisch School of Arts, and Visual Arts at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and Cooper Union, School of Art. Opera: With director Christopher Alden: Phaeton, Saarlandisches Staatstheater; Die Entfuhrung Aus Dem Serail, Theater Basel; Imeneo, Glimmerglass Opera; Carmen, Nationaltheater Manheim; In Mahler's Shadow, EOS Orchestra; La Serva Padrone, Pauvre Matelot, Rita, San Francisco Opera Center. With Roy Rallo: The Methusalem Projekt, Nationaltheater Weimar; Ariadne Auf Naxos, Opera National de Bordeaux; DON PASQUALE, Nationaltheater Weimar; La Finta Giardiniera, San Francisco Opera Center; Bluebeard's Castle and Elektra, Long Beach Opera. With Ken Rus Schmoll, sets and costumes for the U.S. premiere of Wolfgang Rihm’s Proserpina, Spoleto Festival. Recent theater: Environment/costumes for Habit, by David Levine, Luminato Festival, Toronto, Mass MoCA & Watermill Center; Blueflower, directed by Will Pomerantz, A.R.T. , (Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Design); Lascivious Something, Sheila Callaghan, Women’s Project; Bleakhouse with Heiko Kalmbach, Bauhaus Festival, Theaterhaus Jena; Kafeneion directed by Dimitri Kourtakis, Athens/Epidaurus Festival; The Obie Award-winning Telephone, directed by Ken Rus Schmoll, Foundry Theater; Knock-Out directed by Heiko Kalmbach, Thalia Theater, Hamburg; Theaterhaus Jena. Select solo and group exhibitions: Moving House, Sheffield Historical Society; Pavlov's Lab And Other Rooms, solo exhibit at Magnus Muller Gallery, Berlin; Design Life Now, National Design Triennial, Cooper Hewitt Museum, ICA Boston and Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. Recipient of NEA/TCG career development award and MacDowell Colony fellowships.

Mimi Lien is a designer of sets/environments for theater, dance, and opera. She was born in New Haven, CT, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Having arrived at set design from a background in architecture, her work often focuses on the interaction between audience/environment and object/performer. Her work has been seen at the Signature Theatre, The Kitchen, The Joyce, Dance Theater Workshop, the Wilma Theater, A.R.T., Berkeley Rep, Alliance Theater, Playmakers Rep, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Bard Summerscape, and Pennsylvania Ballet, among others. Mimi is an artistic associate with Pig Iron Theatre Company, and resident designer at BalletTech. She was a semifinalist in the Ring Award competition for opera design in Graz, Austria. Her work has been recognized by a Barrymore Award, two Barrymore nominations, an American Theatre Wing Hewes Design Award nomination, and will be presented in the 2011 Prague Quadrennial. She participated in the recent exhibition, Landscapes of Quarantine, at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. Ms. Lien studied architecture at Yale University, set design at NYU, and was a recipient of the 2007-2009 NEA/TCG Career Development Program.

Susan Mosakowski is a playwright, director, and Co-Artistic Director of Creation Production Company, an interdisciplinary theatre company in New York City. Her plays and theatre works have been produced at Manhattan Theatre Club, The Flea, La MaMa, the Ohio Theatre, P.S. 122, Dance Theatre Workshop, the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Painted Bride Art Center, The Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Southern Theater, The Baltimore Theatre Project, The Kunsterhaus Bethanien in Berlin, and others. Among her awards are a Rockefeller Foundation Playwriting Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Playwriting Fellowship, three Northwest Area Fellowships, a J.M. Kaplan Foundation grant, a NYFA Artist Fund award, and numerous NYSCA grants. Published works include The Tight Fit and Cities Out of Print in the anthologies: Best of the West, and Plays from the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival. She has been a resident artist at the Long Beach Opera, the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, the Illusion Theatre, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, The Weston Playhouse, and Ireland's Tyrone Guthrie Playwriting Center. She is a resident playwright of New Dramatists.

Katie Pearl is a collaborative theater director who develops new plays and site-specific performance with writers, musicians, and visual artists throughout the country. She frequently performs in the work she makes with long-term creative partner, Lisa D'Amour. Together as PearlDamour, they have received MAP and Creative Capital awards, performance commissions including the Whitney Museum Performance on 42nd series, PS122, Brookfield Properties/ Arts>WFC, and awards including a 2003 OBIE for Nita & Zita. Upcoming projects include PearlDamour's How to Build a Forest, an 8-hour performance installation premiering at The Kitchen in June 2011, and The Talking Band’s Panic! Euphoria!, developed with the company at New Dramatists and premiering this October at HERE in NYC. Katie is a Drama League Directing Fellow, a Roothbert Fellow, and a graduate of the University of Washington. She teaches Negotiation within Creative Collaboration in both academic and professional settings. She is a frequent guest faculty at the University of Texas of Austin and is an active member of Austin's New Works Community. She is currently teaching New Play Creation at Montclair University.

Kathryn Petersen is a playwright, actress and teacher residing in the Philadelphia region. She’s had ten plays produced. Cinderella: A Musical Panto, commissioned and produced by People’s Light & Theatre and written in collaboration with Michael Ogborn, garnished 13 Barrymore award nominations, including best new play of 2008. Arthur’s Stone, Merlin’s Fire, published by Dramatic Publishing Company, has been produced by schools and theaters around the country. Kathryn is a member of the Actor’s Equity Association and an Assistant Professor of Theater at Arcadia University. She is currently enrolled in the M.F.A. Playwriting program at Temple University.

James Pyne is Director of Design at People’s Light. In his 32 seasons with PLTC, he has created sets and/or lights for over 200 productions, including Sherlock Holmes & The Case of the Jersey Lily, The Glass Menagerie, Treasure Island, Theophilus North, Humble Boy, The Giver, Twelfth Night, Robin Hood, Anne of Green Gables, The Foreigner, The Crucible, The Member of the Wedding, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Sleeping Beauty, Julius Caesar, Holes, A View from the Bridge, A Delicate Balance, The Little Foxes, He Held Me Grand, Playhouse Creatures, Book of Days, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Road to Mecca, Sally’s Gone, She Left Her Name, and Sister Carrie. Jim has received ten Barrymore nominations for Outstanding Scenic and Lighting Design, winning for Outstanding Scenic Design in 1996 for The Life of Galileo and in 2002 for The Merchant of Venice. He has also designed scenery for the Arden (Sunday in the Park with George, Sweeney Todd, A Little Night Music, Henry V, Hedda Gabler and Private Lives), Villanova University, Act II Playhouse, the Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis and the Enchantment Theatre Company.

Susan Zeeman Rogers’ movement-based scenic designs grew from twenty years of experience as a visual artist. Since moving to New York, Susan has worked with New Georges, Red Bull Theater, Mint Theater (Best Design, First Irish Festival for Is Life Worth Living), Susan Marshall and Co., MCC Theatre, Flea Theatre, Summer Play Festival, Mabou Mines Artists Residency and Lincoln Center Directors Lab. She has collaborated with Ripe Time director, Rachel Dickstein for four productions including the critically acclaimed Innocents, adapted from Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, Betrothed, Fire Throws and the workshop production of Septimus and Clarissa, an adaptation by Ellen McLaughlin of Virginia Woolfe’s Mrs. Dalloway. Regionally, she has designed for Two River Theatre Company, Actors Shakespeare Project, SpeakEasy Stage Company (2010 Elliot Norton Award for Adding Machine, A Musical), Opera Boston (critically acclaimed Nixon in China), Merrimack Repertory Theatre, Commonwealth Shakespeare Co., Underground Railway Theatre, ART Institute, Contemporary American Theatre Co. and Moscow Art Theatre School. Upcoming work includes Septimus and Clarissa for Ripe Time and The Final Strange Tale of Edgar Allan Poe for Trinity Rep. NEA/TCG CDP, www.szrdesign.com

Tony Straiges’ Broadway designs include Enchanted April, Golden Child, Rumors, Into the Woods, Long Day’s Journey into Night, Artist Descending a Staircase, Sunday in the Park with George and Timbuktu! Off-Broadway: Chasing Manet, From Door to Door, Tea at Five, Messiah and Diamonds. He has designed at major regional theatres in the United States and for the Joffrey Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Pacific Northwest Ballet and Royal Ballet of Sweden. Recent designs include Noises Off at Hartford Stage, Tis Pity She’s a Whore at Center Stage in Baltimore. Tony has design models and sketches included in the Tobin Theatre Collection at the McHay Art Museum in San Antonio, the Lawrence and Lee Theatre Institute at the University of Ohio, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts Library in New York City and the Harvard Theatre Collection at Harvard University.

Kathryn Walat’s Victoria Martin: Math Team Queen premiered Off-Broadway at the Women’s Project, and has appeared in Dramatics magazine and New Playwrights: The Best Plays of 2007. Other plays include Bleeding Kansas (Hangar Theatre), awarded a Francesca Primus Citation; Know Dog (Salvage Vanguard); and Johnny Hong Kong (Perishable Theatre). Her work has been commissioned and produced by La Jolla Playhouse and Actors Theatre of Louisville, and developed at such places as The Public Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, Playwrights Horizons, MCC, McCarter Theatre, Ars Nova, Sundance Theatre Lab, Voice & Visions, Electric Pear, and Bay Area Playwrights Festival. Her latest play Creation was commissioned by Yale Repertory Theatre and was workshopped at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center this past summer. She is co-librettist (with composer Gregory Spears) of the opera Paul’s Case, and is currently developing a new play with the Germ Project at New Georges, where she is also an affiliated playwright. Ms. Walat received her BA from Brown University and her MFA from the Yale School of Drama, and teaches playwriting at Savannah College of Art and Design.