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Julia conceived, founded and administrated The Drama League’s Directors Project, a national training program for young directors whose alumni now include, for example, the head of the Yale School of Drama, James Bundy; The Artistic Director of The La Jolla Playhouse, Chris Ashley; Tony Winner Michael Mayer, (Spring Awakening and Thoroughly Modern Millie), the Artistic Director of American Repertory Theater at Harvard, Diane Paulus and director of Hair, Porgy and Bess, and Pippin.
Julia founded Theater Masters when she moved from NYC to Aspen, CO and started The National MFA Playwrights Festival in association with Brown, Yale, Columbia, NYU, Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern, Iowa, USLA, UCSD and the University of Texas at Austin. Works by the winning playwrights are presented both in Aspen and NYC. She began The Visionary Playwrights’ Commissions and Awards in association with The Aspen Institute, Playwrights Horizons, Primary Stages, Steppenwolf, La Jolla, and The Dallas Theater Center. Winners of these competitions have gone on to win Fulbrights, been nominated for Pulitzer Prizes and had their works produced at Lincoln Center, Manhattan Theater Club and Playwrights Horizons to name a few. Her latest program- Theater for Social Change began last year at Ohio State. This is an one week in-school playwriting program for college students which focuses on social issues culminating in a presentation for a public audience with an interactive community discussion following the presentation. In the theater arena, she has served on the boards of The Acting Company, The American Academy of Dramatic Arts, The Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation, Lincoln Center Theater and the Shakespeare Festival at Tulane. She has taught at the Yale School of Drama, Ohio State University and Doane University in NE. She is proud to have a directing award in her name that has been given to such luminaries as Mike Nichols, Jack O’Brien and Bartlett Sher. She has created performances honoring celebrities such as Andrew Lloyd Webber, Hal Prince, and Liz Smith. Other projects Julia has created for Theater Masters include a publication of the awarding wining MFA plays by Samuel French and Co., a collaboration with the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center for playwright-director teams, and an in-school playwriting program and competition for high school students in the Roaring Fork Valley. She began her career on Wall Street working for Prudential Bache and is a member of The Women Corporate Directors Association. Not-for-profit board service has included such diverse organizations as The Madeira School, The Aspen Writers Foundation, and The Anderson Ranch. Current services includes The Calder Quartet, The 4 Arts, and the National Board of the English-Speaking Union. She is a graduate of Vassar College and on the Advisory Board of the Drama League’s Directors’ Project. |
STEPHEN CEDARS
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Stephen is a writer, director, scholar and teacher originally from south Louisiana. Over his past several decades in New York City, he has worked in and around the theatre in multiple capacities—as a director, producer, production manager, and sound designer, to name a few—and as an educator has worked with students from second grade through the professional level to hone their craft and enhance their ability to express themselves.
As director and producer, he has: staged classic, canonical works; developed new plays; organized and managed festival showcases; facilitated the production of student-run performances; and has produced several years of community programming in south Williamsburg through Brooklyn Arts Council funding. As a writer, his plays have been produced or developed throughout the United States and Canada, and have been published by Original Works and Words of Choice. In all these capacities, his work has bridged the Aristotelian and the avant-garde, and he endeavors to employ this holistic understanding both to his own work and that he develops with students or other artists. As an educator, he has helped students in both academic and creative subjects. In terms of script writing, he has worked with students age 8-18 through Writopia Lab, and with working writers and actors through Kimball Studios. Amongst his awards: Visionary Playwright Commission, John Golden Playwriting Prize, and the Gloria Ann Barnell Peter Award. He has completed fellowships with Target Margin Theatre and America-in-Play, and has been a visiting artist with the Centre Stage New Play Festival and the Palm Beach New Play Festival. His work is regularly named finalist or semi-finalist with prestigious competitions including the O’Neill Playwrights Conference and the Stella Adler Playwright-in-Residence program. He earned an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU, which he attended on a Rita and Burton Goldberg Fellowship, and is pursuing his PhD with the CUNY Graduate Center, where he studies both the performance live music and transgressive theatrical performance. |