Resident Artists
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Heather Basarab, Lighting Designer. Heather Basarab is proud to have collaborated with Crowded Fire on productions of 'Maid, One Big Lie, Slow Falling Bird, Juan Gelion Dances for the Sun, We Are Not These Hands, Big Death and Little Death, and The Listener. Additionally, her designs have been seen with many Bay Area companies including Encore, Cutting Ball, Campo Santo, Shotgun Players, Thick Description, the Magic Theater, the New Pickle Circus, Axis Dance Co., and the Joe Goode Performance Group, with whom she received an Isadora Duncan Award for production design of Drowsy. Heather teaches technical theater and design at Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley. |
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Laura Brueckner is a dramaturg specializing in new play development and digital dramaturgy. Since her internship for dramaturgy and literary management at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, she has thoroughly enjoyed working with numerous Bay Area theatre companies and festivals, including ACT, Berkeley Rep, Crowded Fire Theater, Last Planet Theatre, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and the National Queer Arts Festival. Laura joined Crowded Fire in 2010 after her maiden voyage with the company, serving as dramaturg for the world premiere of Enrique Urueta’s Forever Never Comes, directed by Mary Guzmàn. Laura earned her BA with Honors from UC Berkeley in Dramatic Literature, and is currently studying for her Ph.D. in theatre at UCSD, where she has ‘turged for several department productions, including Medea, directed by Isis Misdary and Danton’s Death, directed by Dominique Serrand. Laura’s research focuses on the dramaturgy of variety entertainments, including burlesque, vaudeville, cabaret, and festivals. She also writes and directs for theatre, maintains several ongoing music projects, and continues to work in variety performance. |
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Cliff Caruthers has created soundscapes and music for over a hundred Bay Area productions, including Gone, Anna Bella Eema, Porcelain, Slow Falling Bird, and Slaughter City for Crowded Fire Joe Turner's Come and Gone, TRAGEDY: a Tragedy, and Crime and Punishement for Berkeley Rep, Anna Bella Eema for Crowded Fire, Brainpeople for A.C.T., Bone to Pick, Mud, Macbeth, and Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World for Cutting Ball Theater, Bug for SF Playhouse and Caroline, or Change for TheatreWorks. He is an artistic associate at Cutting Ball Theater, a company member of Crowded Fire, and the resident sound designer for TheatreWorks. Outside the theatre world, he is co-curator of the San Francisco Tape Music Center and technical director for the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival. Cliff's electronic music has been performed at the 2007 Prague Quadrennial, 964 Natoma, Deep Wireless, Noise Pancakes, SFEMF, SFTMF, and the Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States. Upcoming projects include Pelleas and Mellisande for Cutting Ball Theater, Dead Man's Cell Phone for SF Playhouse, Distracted for TheatreWorks, and Drip for Crowded Fire. |
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Sonia Fernández loves new plays. She is a San Francisco-based dramaturg, translator and arts administrator. She works or has worked for many different local theater companies (Playwrights Foundation, Brava, Z Space, Cutting Ball, Magic, PlayGround and Crowded Fire) in various capacities. As Resident Dramaturg for PlayGround,she works one-on-one with local commissioned playwrights to develop their work. Sonia is a proud member of the Crowded Fire Company. Most recently, she provided dramaturgy for CF’s production of Wreckage by Caridad Svich. She is also a member of the Magic Artists Lab, recent projects include assistant directing on Magic Theatre's Oedipus El Rey by Luis Alfaro. Sonia was Playwrights Foundation's Literary and Administrative Director for two years. For PF, Sonia served as dramaturg of March by Sharyn Rothstein in the 2009 Bay Area Playwrights Festival and is currently serving on the 2010 Bay Area Playwrights Festival selection committee. As a member of Cutting Ball's 10th anniversary committee, Sonia will be working on producing the company's Vanguardia Playwrights Festival in July 2010. Sonia received her Master’s in theatre arts from San Francisco State and BA in English from Princeton. In an effort to continue over-educating herself, she will be pursuing her PhD in Theater next fall. |
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Jarrod Fischer Green is a lighting guy. He works locally with the likes of the Magic Theatre, the Aurora, the Shotgun Players, the Willows, the Lorraine Hansberry Theater, Marin Theater Company, Just Theater, and others. He's been a resident artist with Crowded Fire for four years, where people said especially nice things about his designs for Anna Bella Eema and Gone. You can find out more than you want to know about him at Stupendous Fish. In his other life, Jarrod is a preschool teacher, and has his master's degree in early childhood education. |
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Erin Gilley is the former Managing Director of Crowded Fire, and is currently an actor, director, and video artist with the company. Erin currently works in the artistic office of the Magic Theatre, and is also the founding Artistic Director of elastic future. elastic future directing credits include Abducted, Beautiful, The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Deal, and the short film Joiners. In addition to her work with elastic future, Erin has directed and acted for several other theater companies in the Bay area, including Last Planet Theatre, TheatreFIRST, Shotgun Players, Theatre in the Woods, and AlterTheatre. Erin studied theater at Princeton University where she was awarded the Frances LeMoyne Page Award for directing. Erin is originally from the mountains of northwest Georgia. www.eringilley.com |
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Michele Leavy has been seen in Crowded Fire’s productions of Top Girls, A-A-America! and Big Death and Little Death. A bay area native, she has performed locally with such companies as the American Conservatory Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Center Repertory Company, California Conservatory Theater, Livermore Shakespeare Festival, Marin Theatre Company, The Eugene O’Neill Foundation – Tao House, and TheatreWorks, among others. In other locales, she has appeared with Theatre Key West (Florida), and The Elephant Theatre Company (Los Angeles). Trained in classical ballet, she continues to dance collaborates with the Alameda Civic Ballet. Michele earned her MFA from the Professional Actor Training Program at UC Davis, where she currently teaches in the undergraduate program, and also serves on the faculty of the American Conservatory Theatre’s Young Conservatory. |
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Rami has been seen in Crowded Fire's productions of Slow Falling Bird and The Listener. Other Bay Area companies she has worked with include Shotgun Players, Woman's Will, Magic Theater, Willows Theater, Cal Shakes, S.F. Shakes, Word for Word and City Circus. She studied acting at the Bennett Theatre Lab in S.F., clowning and bouffon at Ecole Phillippe Gaulier in Paris and dance in various clubs and studios in the Bay Area, Haiti, Cuba and Indonesia. She is a former member of Group Petit La Croix, the West-coast's premiere Haitian dance company, Project Reconnect, an African Diaspora dance-theater collective, The Original Action Pack, an improv-comedy troupe and Woman's Will, the Bay Area's all-female Shakespeare company. She is currently a dance-workout instructor at ODC in the Mission. |
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A recent graduate of Reed College with a BA in Theatre/Literature, Elana McKernan has worn many theatre-shaped hats and is currently a Marketing intern with Berkeley Rep. At Reed, she directed five full-length plays, all of which were new works, and two of which she developed and wrote herself. In the Bay Area, Elana has interned with both Crowded Fire and Woman's Will, directed a staged reading of Evidence, a new play by Benjamin Colahan, and participated in Woman's Will's 24 Hour Playfest as a playwright. Favorite theatre projects include: Lamb to the Slaughter, a one-act play based on Roald Dahl's short story of the same name, which she adapted and directed; Dirty Water, an original play written by Devon Granmo and directed by Elana; and The Golden Key, a morbid little play based on the collected fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, adapted and directed by Elana. Elana recently Assistant Directed Crowded Fire's production of Wreckage, and has been channeling the "voice of the Crowded Fire monkey" through her articles in CF's e-newsletter, Burn This Newsletter. |
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Since graduating from SFSU with a degree in Theatre Arts and a minor in English Language Studies, Amanda spends her time working as a stage manger, production manager, and technical director. With Crowded Fire, she’s worked on Juan Gelion Dances for the Sun, Big Death & Little Death, and Anna Bella Eema. Other theatre company credits include Primitive Screwheads (The Chainsaw Massacres), Demon 13Z Productions (Crazy Go Nuts), Into the Breach (Otherwise, Andronicus), foolsFURY (Big Love) and Woman’s Will (Lord of the Flies, Richard III, Happy End, Twelfth Night). Amanda also dabbles in film & television. Some of the projects in which Amanda has appeared (both in front of and behind the camera) include Haiku Tunnel, Heart of the Possible, The Matrix Reloaded, Presidio Med, and Insomniac with Dave Attell. |
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Working as a professional actor in the Bay Area for over 15 years, Lawrence has developed and debuted roles in Crowded Fire's world premiere of Liz Duffy Adam’s The Listener, Mickey Birnbaum’s Big Death & Little Death, and Dominic Orlando’s Juan Gelion Dances for the Sun. Other theatre credits include productions at Thick Description, Marin Theatre Company, Brava! For Women in Arts, Golden Thread Productions, and Uncle Buzzy's Hometown Theatre Show. His television work includes NBC's Trauma, ABC’s The Evidence, and CBS’s Nash Bridges. |
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Marilee Talkington is the Artistic Director of Vanguardian Productions (SF,NY), Resident Artist of Crowded Fire (SF), and a Member Of TBTB's Off-Broadway Company in New York, where she was recently nominated for the 2009 Princess Grace Award. Most recently, she played the lead female role in TBTB's revival of A.R. Gurney's The Middle Ages. As a writer/director her original works include Attrition(nominated for the 2009 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize), Truce (Solo Show, SF, NYC), Sugarville: a little death (Players Theatre, NYC), The Rape Poems (SF, NYC, Edinburgh, Philadelphia), and Daughter of the Floods (SF). She holds an M.F.A. in Acting from the American Conservatory Theater, where she was awarded the A.C.T. Carol Channing Trouper Award for Commitment and Leadership. She is one of only two legally blind actors in the country to be awarded an M.F.A. in Acting and just recently met the ‘other girl like her' at TBTB last November. Talkington is also a contributing writer for the Kennedy Center's online magazine 'Opening Stages' and wrote and self-published an acting training book called, the Zen Handbook for Actors in 2001. Her favorite regional acting credits include Mrs. Cratchit (A Christmas Carol, A.C.T.), Elektra (Elektra, A.C.T.), Abadonna (Master and Margarita, A.C.T.), Proust (Gone by Charles L. Mee, Crowded Fire), The Last Day by Justin Quinn Pelegano (E.S.T.) and Godspell (Center REP, Critic’s Circle Award). |
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Travis aspires to be a renaissance man and everything that that entails. He began acting in children’s theater when he was nine years old and hasn’t taken a break yet. More recently he has moved from in front of the spotlight, to behind the light board, taking a stage managing job with Ragged Wing Ensemble’s production of The History of The Devil. He assistant stage managed Gone and The Listener with Crowded Fire, was assistant set designer with CF on DRIP, and has worked intensely for Town Hall Theatre of Lafayette on the stage, behind the scenes and in production office. He thanks his loved ones for their constant support. |
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Born and raised in the concrete canyons of NYC, Mollena has been writing and performing on stage since the age of five. In addition to performing in dozens of commercials, she sang on the soundtrack of The Wiz and appeared as an extra in numerous films and television shows. She attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Playwright's Horizon's Wing. She appears in the cult classic film, America's Deadliest Home Video, along with childhood star/media train-wreck Danny Bonaduce. Her one-woman show 69Stories: One Pervert's Tale was developed with Anne Galjour and premiered by Crowded Fire, and enjoyed three full runs in San Francisco between 1997 and 2004. Her theater work has received critical acclaim including awards for "Best Local Actress" and "Most Radiant Presence in Shackles," a category created for her solo show and no doubt to be a singular honor! Mollena is a founding member of Crowded Fire where she has appeared in Greek Salad, A Hard Heart, Top Girls, Slaughter City, 'Maid, One Big Lie, and Gone. She has also worked with Women's Will, Theater Rhinoceros and Berkeley Repertory Theatre. |
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