Nephelie Andonyadis
Designer
(Designer) With a background in performance and architecture, Nephelie made the transition to stage design at Yale University’s School of Drama where she earned her M.F.A. She was an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan and joined the faculty of University of Redlands in 2001. Concurrent with her teaching, she maintains actively engaged with many regional and ensemble theatre companies with whom she designs sets and/or costumes. At Cornerstone, she has designed Jason in Eureka, Los Illegals, 3/7/11: A Lincoln Heights Tale, Boda de Luna Nueva and Sid Arthur. Through her ongoing relationship with South Coast Repertory, she has designed in every season since 1998 including Saturn Returns. Other theaters include Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Portland Center Stage, Center Theatre Group, The Acting Company, The Guthrie Lab, The Court theatre and many others. She is the recipient of the University of Redlands’ Hunsaker Innovative Teaching Award and the NEA/TCG Design Fellowship.
Juliette Carrillo
Director
For Cornerstone, Juliette has directed community collaborations Los Faustinos by Bernardo Solano, As Vishnu Dreams by Shishir Kurup and Lethe by Octavio Solis, as well as Literature-to-Life productions The House on Mango Street and Warriors Don't Cry. Juliette was an Artistic Associate at South Coast Repertory Theatre for seven years. She directed regularly in their season and ran the Hispanic Playwright's Project, collaborating with Latino writers across the country. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, she has directed theater extensively throughout the US. Some of her favorite collaborations have been directing the West Coast premiere of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize winner, Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz at South Coast Repertory, the World Premiere of References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot by Jose Rivera, also at South Coast Repertory, and the West Coast premiere of Sam Shepard's Eyes for Consuela at the Magic in San Francisco. She has directed for the Alliance Theatre, TheatreWorks, Laguna Playhouse, New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, Actor's Theatre of Louisville and for the Mark Taper Forum's New Work Festival, as well as workshops in New York theatres such as New York Theatre Workshop, The Public, INTAR and The Women's Project. Juliette is a recipient of several awards, including the prestigious National Endowment of the Arts/Theatre Communications Group Directing Fellowship and the Princess Grace Award. She also participated in American Film Institute's Directing Workshop for Women, where she wrote and directed her first short film, Spiral, which played in nine film festivals around the country and in Europe, garnering finalist recognition in several. She is currently writing a full-length screenplay and developing several theater projects in the Los Angeles and Bay areas.
Paula Donnelly
Institute Director
Paula began working with Cornerstone in 1998 as a stage manager and joined Cornerstone's Ensemble in 1999. Community-collaborations she has stage managed for Cornerstone include Los Biombos in Boyle Heights, AKA in Beverly Hills, For Here or To Go?, a city-wide bridge show, at the Mark Taper Forum, Peter Pan in Cleveland, and Crossings at St Vibiana's Cathedral in downtown Los Angeles and the Festival of Faith. She also was the stage manager for Cornerstone Ensemble shows Foot/Mouth (produced in multiple malls around Southern California) and Erik Ehn's Mary Shelley's Santa Claus. As a stage manager she has worked on a variety of productions with Taper, Too, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Milwaukee Repertory Theater, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, PCPA TheaterFest and other regional theaters. As Institute Director for Cornerstone, Paula plans and produces the annual Institute Summer Residency and 2-Day Intensives. Through the Institute Summer Residencies, Paula's love for Cornerstone and for California's people and places has increased exponentially.
Marcenus “M.C.” Earl
Actor
M.C. first came to Cornerstone as a community member back in 1993 during the company's Watts Residency when he appeared in Love of a Nightingale and Breaking Plates. Other community collaborations M.C. has appeared in include Broken Hearts, For Here or To Go?, For All Time and the ongoing Beyond the Diagnosis, Cornerstone's partnership with Gilead Sciences, Inc. to promote HIV/AIDS awareness through theater. M.C. is a graduate of USIU San Diego's B.F.A. Acting Program.
Michael John Garcés
Artistic Director
For Cornerstone, Michael has directed Making Paradise by Tom Jacobson, Shishir Kurup and Deborah Wicks La Puma, 3 Truths by Naomi Iizuka, Someday by Julie Marie Myatt, attraction by Page Leong, and The Falls by Jeffrey Hatcher (at the Guthrie Theater). He also wrote Los Illegals, created in residence with communities of day laborers and domestic workers. Los Illegals was subsequently produced by Teatro Bravo in Phoenix; it is published inTheatre Magazine (Yale School of Drama/Duke University Press - More info on this Publication). Directing credits at other theaters include, most recently, red, black and GREEN: a blues by Marc Bamuthi Joseph (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts) and Oedipus El Rey by Luis Alfaro (Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company), and he has worked at many theaters across the country. His full-length plays include THE WEB (needtheatre), points of departure and customs (INTAR Hispanic American Arts Center) and Acts of Mercy (Rattlestick Playwrights Theater); a solo performance, agua ardiente (The American Place); short plays include catch (Active Cultures), hymn in three parts (Chalk Rep), inhabited and in the Zone (Red Fern Theatre Co.), tostitos (EST Marathon of One-Act Plays), on edge and the ride (Humana Fest.), audiovideo (The Directors Project) and sandlot ball (Mile Square). He collaborated with composer Alexandra Vrebalov on the oratorio Stations, which received its premiere at the Rhode Island Civic Chorale and Orchestra and was also performed at the NOMUS Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia. Michael is on the executive board of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society and serves on the Ovation review Committee for the Los Angeles Stage Alliance. He is a recipient of the Princess Grace Statue, the Alan Schneider Director Award, a TCG/New Generations Grant, the Non-Profit Excellence Award from the Center of Non-Profit Managment and is a Southern California Leadership Network Fellow. He is a company member at Woolly Mammoth and a proud alumnus of New Dramatists.
Sigrid Gilmer
Playwright
Sigrid’s full-length plays include The Great White Way, Ball Game, Slavey and Axiom. The Great White Way began at the Flea Theatre’s Pataphysics Workshop led by Paula Vogel, in March of 2006. A workshop production was produced in Los Angeles at the Metro Gallery and as part of Exquisite Acts and Everyday Rebellion-Cal Arts Feminist Art Project. Sigrid has worked with Cornerstone Theater (The Brothers, 2009; A Space Between, 2008; Phantoms at my Table, 2008; Head Trip, 2008; The Sweep, 2007), Watts Village Theatre Company (Axiom, 2008), Clubbed Thumb Theatre Company (Slavey, 2008) and Playwriting Center of Theatre Emory (Brave New Works, 2009). Sigrid has a B.A. in theatre from Cal State LA (1997), where she studied with Jose Cruz-Gonzalez, and a M.F.A. in playwriting from Cal Arts (2005), where she was mentored by Suzan-Lori Parks and Erik Ehn. Before graduate school she lived in New York where she worked as a theatre administrator at HERE Arts Center (1998-2002). Sigrid has been a Jerome, PONY Fellowship, New Victory Garden’s IGNITION, and Kesselring finalist (2006, 2007 & 2008). She has studied theatre in Japan, Rwanda and the University of Iowa. Current obsessions include: American history, Reality TV, whiteness, the mind and the Misfits. Sigrid lives in Los Angeles.
Raquel Gutierréz
Manager of Community Partnerships
Raquel comes to Cornerstone after participating in their 2010 summer show It's All Bueno in Pacoima. She was most recently the Assistant Director at the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Southern California (2005-2010). Raquel has also worked for P.L.A.Y Theater for Youth at the Center Theater Group. Previously, she was also an artist-mentor with Will Power to Youth at The Shakespeare Center Los Angeles and the House Manager at Highways Performance Space (2002-2003). Also a performer and artist, Raquel is one of the co-founding members of the performance ensemble, Butchlalis de Panochtitlan (BdP), a community-based and activist-minded group aimed at creating a visual vernacular around queer Latinidad in Los Angeles. Raquel wrote BdP's first full-length play, The Barber of East L.A. (directed by Luis Alfaro) which has been staged at various venues nationally, including at the Traveling Jewish Theater in San Francisco and Jump-Start Performance Co. in San Antonio. She has performed nationally and held National Performance Network artist residencies with BdP. A community based performance artist and cultural activist, Raquel is also a writer/journalist whose work has appeared in the LA Weekly, Make/shift, Journal of Chicana/Latina Studies, Izote Vos: Salvadoran American Literary and Visual Art and on AfterEllen.com. Raquel graduated from California State University, Northridge with a B.A. in Journalism and Central American Studies and has a M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University.
Peter Howard
Actor, Playwright
Peter is a founding member of Cornerstone Theater Company. Born and raised in Massachusetts, he graduated from Harvard College with a degree in English and American Literature and holds a M.F.A. from the Department of Drama of the University of Virginia. With Cornerstone, Peter has performed in, written or otherwise collaborated on scores of productions in Los Angeles and around the country. As a playwright, his Cornerstone credits include Zones (an original, audience-interactive play exploring interfaith themes), an American Muslim adaptation of You Can't Take It with You (the first adaptation ever approved by the Kaufman and Hart estate) and a bilingual adaptation of Lorca's Blood Wedding (Boda de Luna Nueva: New Moon Wedding, created for the small California agricultural communities of Western Stanislaus County as part of the company's 2005 Summer Institute). His regional theater work includes productions at the Mark Taper Forum, Williamstown Theatre Festival, American Repertory Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, Long Wharf, and Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Peter has served on staff of the National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ), working as a facilitator, playwright and director in a variety of youth arts programs that use theater as a springboard for dialogue on challenging human relations topics. He has directed the participatory youth script development and performance programs of a number of regional theatres including the Mark Taper Forum (The Speak to Me program) and Shakespeare Festival/LA (Will Power to Youth). Peter is also the author of three plays (collectively known as the Compassion Plays series) now touring southern California high schools, colleges and community groups through ENCOMPASS, a youth development organization based in the San Gabriel Valley: Wheels explores youth attitudes toward immigration; Kick explores the Native American mascot issue in high school sports; Horizon Line explores the root causes and impact of bias-motivated crime.
Nikki Hyde
Stage Manager
Nikki began her relationship with Cornerstone as a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed LA County intern in 2005 during the Faith Cycle Bridge show, A Long Bridge Over Deep Waters. Shortly after completing a stage management fellowship at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival three years later, she returned to her Cornerstone roots by working on the stage management teams of For All Time, Touch the Water, On Caring for the Beast, and the Justice Cycle Bridge show, 3 Truths. She has had the pleasure of working on Broadway, as well as with Center Theatre Group, Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles, Greenway Court Theatre and Company of Angels, among other LA theaters. She has also worked as a production assistant on Desperate Housewives. A proud Michigan native and a graduate of the University of Southern California, Nikki enjoys volunteering for 826LA and KPFK’s The Global Village when she’s not doing all of the above.
Lynn Jeffries
Costume/Scenic/Puppet Designer
Lynn Jeffries has been a member of Cornerstone Theater since 1986, and has designed sets, costumes or puppets for over 60 Cornerstone productions. Her regional theater work includes designs for Arena Stage, The Guthrie, Long Wharf Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, South Coast Repertory, and TheatreWorks. In an ongoing collaboration with puppeteer/performance artist Paul Zaloom, she has built puppets, dramaturged, designed, and puppeteered on numerous projects, including The Mother of All Enemies, The Abecedarium, The Adventures of White-Man, and the film Dante's Inferno. She also performs solo shadow puppet shows in nightclubs with the neo-vaudevillian folk/jazz band, The Ditty Bops. Other recent puppet designs include Culture Clash's Peace at the Getty Villa, Project Wonderland and The Gogol Project at the Bootleg Theater, and To Kill a Mockingbird and Don Quixote at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Lynn has won a Theatre LA Ovation Honor and a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for puppet design; a Backstage West Garland Award and a Drama-Logue Award for scenic design; and a Backstage West Garland Award for costume design.
Geoff Korf
Lighting Designer
Geoff has worked professionally as a free-lance lighting designer for the past twenty years. His designs have appeared on Broadway as well as at many regional theatres including The Mark Taper Forum, South Coast Repertory, The Geffen Playhouse, La Jolla Playhouse, The Old Globe, Long Beach Opera, The Minneapolis Children's Theatre Company, Actor's Theatre of Louisville, Seattle Repertory Theatre, The Goodman Theatre and The Kennedy Center in Washington DC. Geoff first came to Cornerstone as the lighting designer for Rushing Waters in 1992. Since then he has designed more than 20 Cornerstone productions including: An Antigone Story, Los Biombos/The Screens, and For Here or To Go?I. Geoff is the head of the design program at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he teaches lighting design. He is a native of Southern California, and a graduate of California State University, Chico, and the Yale School of Drama.
Shishir Kurup
Actor, Writer, Director, Composer
Shishir’s play Merchant on Venice premiered in Chicago and appears in the anthology Beyond Bollywood and Broadway. He recieved the TIME (Time for Inspiration, Motivation and Exploration) Grant from the Audrey Skirball Foundation for his body of work. Princess Grace Fellow, TCG/Alan Schneider directing finalist, and two-time Herb Alpert nominee. Feature film Sharif Don’t Like It (writer/director) about the loss of Habeas Corpus. TV and film credits: Bones, Lost, Sleeper Cell, Alias, Monk, Surface, Heroes, and most recently the Disney Channel movie musical, Lemonade Mouth.
Page Leong
Actor, Director, Choreographer
Member of Cornerstone for 17 years, performing, writing, directing, and choreographing in over 50 productions. Favorite roles from the Greek: Antigone in Shishir Kurup’s An Antigone Story, Medea in Bill Rauch and Tracy Young’s Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella, Odysseus in The Wanderings of Odysseus, by Oliver Taplin. Film: Bourne Legacy and Ben Affleck’s ARGO. Page so believes in the power of theater to spark our minds, hearts and lives.
Julie Marie Myatt
Playwright
Julie most recently wrote A Man Comes to Fowler, for Cornerstone’s Institute Summer Residency in the agricultural town of Fowler, California. Her play Someday premiered as part of Cornerstone's Justice Cycle in 2008. Other works include: The Happy Ones, premiered at South Coast Repertory; Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter, premiered at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and performed at the Kennedy Center as part of the Center's Fund for New American Plays; My Wandering Boy, premiered at South Coast Repertory in 2007 as part of the Pacific Playwrights Festival and produced in New York as part of the 2007 Summer Play Festival; Boats on a River, premiered at the Guthrie Theater, a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and recorded for the LA Theatre Works radio play series "The Play's The Thing"; Mr. and Mrs., premiered at the 2007 Humana Festiva; and The Sex Habits of American Women, produced by the Guthrie Theatre, Signature Theater in Arlington, VA, among others, and premiered at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. Julie’s work has been developed or seen at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Seattle Rep, Cherry Lane, A.S.K. Theatre Projects, LAByrinth Theater Company, Denver Center Theatre, among others. She received a Walt Disney Studios Screenwriting Fellowship, a Jerome Fellowship at the Playwrights' Center, and a McKnight Advancement Grant. She is currently working on commissions for ACT Seattle, Roundabout Theatre, and Yale Repertory. She is a resident member of New Dramatists.
Tali Pressman
Managing Director
Tali joins the Ensemble after joining Cornerstone's staff in summer 2007. Most recently she was the Special Projects Director at Progressive Jewish Alliance (PJA) where she was responsible for strategic outreach to twenty and thirty-somethings, branding and major public programming. In 2003, while at PJA, Tali created and secured funding for the Jeremiah Fellowship, a year-long program that educates and trains emerging Jewish social justice leaders, now in its third year. She helped expand the Jeremiah Fellowship to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006. In June 2007 she was awarded The Mark Meltzer New and Innovative Programming Award from the Jewish Communal Professionals of Southern California for her creation of the Jeremiah Fellowship. She also produced PJA's annual event Vodka Latka: Festival of Rights that brought together culture and social justice through musical performances and a candle lighting with local activists, politicians and artists. In 2005 Vodka Latka was produced in San Francisco, New York and Boston. Prior to PJA, Tali was the Director of Yiddishkayt Los Angeles where she created and spearheaded the AVADA Initiative, an innovative project to engage people under 35 in Yiddish language and culture. Her 2003 screening of The Dybbuk at Hollywood Forever Cemetery attracted more than 800 people. Tali is a participant of Reboot, a non-profit organization dedicated to exploring contemporary Jewish culture, and previously the Los Angeles coordinator. A graduate of University of California at Santa Cruz, she studied theater and Modern Literature. She has studied writing, acting, and directing for years.
Bahni Turpin
Actor
Bahni trained at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, and later at the Lee Strassberg Theatre Institute. While in NY she appeared in productions at Crossroads Theater, American Place Theater, New York Renaissance Festival, and also began her film and television career with appearances on Law and Order and in the films Daughters of the Dust, The Saint of Fort Washington, Rain Without Thunder, Getting In and Theory of Achievement. Since moving to LA Bahni has become a yoga teacher, and has had numerous guest spots on television including E.R., Judging Amy, Seinfeld, The Parkers, Star Trek Voyager and Girlfriends, to name a few. Additional film credits include Brokedown Palace and Crossroads. Bahni has also had the good fortune to participate in a number of theatrical productions in Los Angeles. She was awarded a Dramalogue award for her work in Mules at the Mark Taper Forum and has appeared in several other productions at the Taper. Just prior to joining Cornerstone, Bahni became a working finalist at The Actors Studio. In joining Cornerstone, Bahni hopes to cover some new ground and bring her work to more people in new ways.
Laurie Woolery
Associate Artistic Director
As a director and playwright, Laurie has collaborated on many new works including Jason in Eureka written by Peter Howard, For All Time written by KJ Sanchez, A Holtville Night's Dream written by Alison Carey, 3/7/11: A Lincoln Heights Tale written by Jose Cruz Gonzalez and the students of Loreto Elementary, Nightingale Middle School and Lincoln High School as part of Cornerstone's first Youth Community Collaboration. Recently, Laurie directed The Language Archive by Julia Cho at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She has also directed Amor Eterno - Six Lessons in Love (an anthology by six Latino playwrights) for the grand opening of the Ricardo Montalban Theatre, Bryan Davidson's Reflecting Back at the Los Angeles Central Library as part of the National Tour of the American Originals exhibit and Richard Coca's solo piece The Day I Flipped Off Jimmy Carter for SCR's Hispanic Playwrights Project. As a director, playwright, educator and actor, Laurie has worked at South Coast Repertory (Director of the Theatre Conservatory), Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Inge Center for the Arts, Denver Center, Los Angeles Theatre Center, Ricardo Montalban Theatre, Deaf-West Theatre, fofo Theatre, Highways Performance Space, A Noise Within, Sundance Playwrights Lab as well as the Sundance Children's Theatre. Cornerstone Theater Company commissioned her solo play Salvadorian Moon/African Sky for its citywide Festival of Faith. Several of her plays Scouting Reality, Bliss, The Hundred Dresses and Orphan Train: The Lost Children have received world premieres at South Coast Repertory. She is a long time artist with the Virginia Avenue Project and former artist-in-residence for Hollygrove Children's Home. Laurie is on faculty at California Institute of the Arts, Citrus College, and California State University at Northridge and serves on the Board of the Latino Producers Action Network (LPAN), Network of Ensemble Theaters (NET) and the Children’s Theatre Foundation of America.
Bill Rauch
Co-Founder, Founding Artistic Director
Bill Rauch co-founded Cornerstone in 1986 and has directed over 40 of the company's productions, including the majority of the company's community collaborations nationwide. In 2007, he was named Artistic Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where he has directed the world premiere of Bill Cain’s Equivocation, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, The Music Man, Handler, The Clay Cart and many others. He has also directed at regional theaters across the country including the Lincoln Center Theater, Yale Repertory, Guthrie Theatre, Arena Stage, South Coast Repertory, Long Wharf Theatre and Great Lakes Theater Festival. For his directorial efforts, Bill has received L.A. Weekly, Drama-Logue, Garland and Helen Hayes Awards, Connecticut Critics Circle Award (for Best Direction), and has been twice nominated for the Ovation Award for Best Director. From 1992 to 1998, he served on the Board of Directors of Theatre Communications Group, the national service organization for non-profit theater (two years as a member of the Executive Committee). He graduated from Harvard College in 1984 where he received the Louis Sudler Prize for outstanding graduating artist. He has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, The Durfee Foundation and the Playwrights Center and Keynote Speaker for Theatre Puget Sound's inaugural conference and has testified before Congress in support of the NEA. Bill is the only artist to have received the inaugural Leadership for a Changing World Award. In October of 2008 he was named a United States Artists Prudential Fellow, and is the recipient of the 2009 Margo Jones Medal. In 2010 he was a Panelist for the Fund for National Projects, Doris Duke Foundation. He is an Associate Artist at Yale Repertory Theater and South Coast Repertory and was a Claire Trevor Professor of Drama at University of California, Irvine during the 2006-2007 academic year.
Alison Carey
Playwright, Co-Founder
Alison has written or co-written over 25 of the Cornerstone's productions, and has been nominated for Emmy, GLAAD and Ovation awards. A member of the Dramatists Guild, she has served on advisory or peer panels for organizations such as The Ford Foundation, Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation, the Mark Taper Forum's Other Voices Projects and Arts Midwest. She has guest lectured at universities and organizations around the country, including at Yale, Stanford and the BAM/CUNY Shakespeare Conference, and taught courses at the University of Southern California and CalState LA in playwriting and community-based theater. Alison and her husband have two children.