Matthew Maguire is a two-time OBIE award winner: once for acting in 1998 and most recently (2007) for direction of his play Abandon at La Mama E.T.C. He is a co-artisticdirector of Creation Production Company, which he founded with Susan Mosakowski. The company has produced forty-nine original works for the stage. His plays, which he often directs, include The Seven Deadly Elements, based on the collage novel by Max Ernst, Eye Figure Fiction, Untitled (The Dark Ages Flat Out), The American Mysteries, The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo, Propaganda, Fun City, Visions of Don Juan, The Tower, and its solo version, Babel Stories, a science fiction opera, Chaos, with Michael Gordon, The Window Man, a musical with Bruce Barthol and Greg Pliska, Phaedra, Throwin’ Bones, which began as a collaboration with architects Diller + Scofidio titled Skin at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels. His work also includes the creation with Philip Glass and Molissa Fenley of A Descent into the Maelström for Australia’s Adelaide Festival. His directing projects include Molière and Charpentier’s Le Malade Imaginaire for the Long Beach Opera, Manhattan Theatre Club’s Downtown Uptown Festival, and the Bang on a Can Festival’s Van Gogh Video Opera. He is an active alumnus of New Dramatists, and served as chairman of the Theatre panel of the New York State Council on the Arts. His awards include fellowships from the NEA, the McKnight and Hammerstein Foundations, New York Foundation for the Arts, and commissions from the NEA, NYSCA, and Meet the Composer.  He received his MFA from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. He performed his play, Luscious Music, as a solo at the Architecture Museum of Basel.  His recent projects have included a new musical with composer Daniel Levy called Laughing Pictures, a new translation of Molière’s Imaginary Invalid, and Faustus/Faustus, an adaptation combining Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, with music by Greg Pliska, and in 2010 he wrote and performed a solo play, Wild Man, which performed to critical acclaim in New York and Los Angeles.  His writing has been published by Sun & Moon Press, Backstage Books/Watson Guptill, Manchester University Press, TheatreForum, Performing Arts Journal, and The Drama Review. In 2009 NoPassport Press published Matthew Maguire: Three Plays. 

Kai Brothers is a production supervisor and consultant with ten years experience in New York theatre. Recent production supervision includes Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park at the Cort Theatre; Sweeney Todd, directed by John Doyle, at the Eugene O’Neil; Souvenir at the Lyceum Theatre; TONY Award-winning The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at the Circle in the Square; TONY Award-winning Urinetown at the Henry Miller Theatre and at the American Theater of Actors; Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the clair de lune at the Belasco; Pulitzer Prize-winning Wit at the Union Square Theatre as well as the Wit national tour; Jonathan Larson’s Tick, Tick…Boom! at the Jane Street Theatre; Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years at the Minetta Lane Theatre; Eve Ensler’s Necessary Targets at the Variety Arts Theatre as well as the Vagina Monologues in Los Angeles; Edward Albee’s The Play About the Baby at the Century Center Theatre, Moises Kaufman’s The Laramie Project at the Union Square Theatre, Kenneth Lonnergan’s Lobby Hero at the John Houseman Theatre, and Anne Meara’s Down the Garden Paths at the Minetta Lane Theatre. Kai has been responsible for a number of special events for corporate and not-for-profit clients. He has consulted on the designof several small theatres in New York City and on larger installations around the country.

George Drance has performed and directed in over twenty countries on five continents, serving such companies as teatro la fragua in Honduras, and Theatre YETU in Kenya. He is currently the Artistic Director of the critically acclaimed Magis Theatre Company, praised for its skill and daring, and best known for its stage adaptations of  C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce and Kalidasa’s Shakuntala and the Ring of Recognition. Other acting credits include The Metropolitan Opera, The Public Theatre/New York Shakespeare Festival, the Shakespeare Project, the American Repertory Theater, and the New Rep and La MaMa E.T.C. As a resident artist in La MaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company, he has toured throughout Europe and Asia with Andrei Serban’s Fragments of a Greek Trilogy  and as a key collaborator on many of Ellen Stewart‘s original pieces. He has worked closely with award-winning composer Elizabeth Swados on several projects, most notably on the development of the first English language production Calderon de la Barca’s 1677  autosacramental  version of La Vida es Sueño translating it with Alfredo Galván, and directing performances at Marquette University, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and here at Fordham. As a performer with the U.S. Improv Theatre League, he was one of seven actors who represented the United States in the 1992 World Cup of Improv in Quebec.  He was also a regular performer with ImprovBoston.  He has been a guest artist and lecturer at Columbia University, Cornell University, Hebrew Union College, Marymouth Manhattan College and Boston College, and has presented workshops for the The New York State Theatre Education Association, the Voice Foundation, The Austrian Voice Institute, and The Kennedy Center‘s International Cultural Exchange Program.  He has been on the faculty of the Marist International Center in Nairobi, Kenya, at Red Cloud High School on the Oglala Sioux Reservation. He also directs retreats exploring spirituality and the arts, co-authored the book Ritual Plays with Fr. Bob VerEecke, SJ, and his reflections on prayer are included in Retta Blaney’s book  Working on the Inside: the Spiritual Life through the Eyes of Actors. He received his MFA in acting from Columbia University.