Faith Hillis is a teaching artist, poet, and performance maker from Houston, Texas, and the capacity building manager for Arts Connect Houston. Hillis has worked with various national and global communities and organizations including: Drama for Schools, Voices Against Violence, Creative Action, the Performing Justice Project, and the United States embassy in Sarajevo. She has degrees from Sam Houston State University and the University of Texas at Austin. Her master’s thesis, Emergent Strategy in Applied Theatre with Youth: Traversing Fear and Creating Justice, examines how artist-facilitators can use performance-based work with youth to help their bodies move past fear in order to envision and perform justice. Hillis is passionate about continuously working in and with communities that actively center justice, equity, and love as an embodied practice.
Kendra Kahl is a performer, director, and teaching artist based in Tempe, Arizona. She currently teaches for Childsplay Theatre Company, Desert Foothills Theatre, and Arizona State University. She has previously taught, directed, and performed with the Rose Theater, Lexington Children’s Theatre, IMAGINE!, and the Virginia Samford Theatre. Kahl’s teaching artistry includes conservatory acting training, social justice building with teens, applied theatre workshops in non-theatre work and education settings, and residencies and classroom partnerships in elementary and middle schools. She is also a playwright. Her work has been performed at the Southeastern Theatre Conference, Thought Bubble Theatre Festival, the Rose Theater, and Samford University. Her newest commission, The One Between, will premiere at the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Kahl is an active member of the American Alliance for Theatre and Education for which she chairs the New Guard Network.
Mila Parrish is a professor of dance at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, where she is the director of dance education. An active scholar, Parrish’s research has established new trends in curricula design, assessment, and teacher training. Her publications appear in the Journal of Dance Education, Research in Dance Education, Arts Education Policy Review, and Journal for Learning through the Arts, among others. She is internationally recognized for her scholarship in digital dance, somatics, and interdisciplinary instruction. A leader in the dance education community, Parrish has offered more than one hundred professional development courses, seminars, and workshops worldwide. She serves as special guest faculty with the Dance Education Laboratory at the 92Y Harkness Dance Center in New York and American Dance Festival. Parrish is the recipient of the leadership award for her community initiatives and theOutstanding Dance Teacher in Higher Education Award from the National Dance Education Organization.
Colleen Hughes is a teaching artist, movement director, and choreographer, as well as a certified intimacy director with the organization Intimacy Directors and Coordinators, where she is also on the staff. Hughes is trained in trauma-informed practices, which are central to her work. She builds her work on a foundation of trust in the humanity of artists and the importance of theatre as a means of connection, communication, and compassion. Her work has been seen in dozens of regional and off-Broadway productions along the east coast, including the Philadelphia Theatre Company, Lantern Theatre Company, Curio Theatre Company, Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre, Simpatico Theatre Company, Drexel University, and Commonwealth Classic Theatre. Hughes holds a degree in theatre from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and has also trained at the Stella Adler Studio. She has taught dance and theatre to students in grades kindergarten through twelve for more than a decade.
Marcelo Tesón is an award-winning filmmaker and teacher with more than two decades of classroom experience. He started his career as a sound editor at Sony Pictures and Universal Studios, where his professional credits included the TV shows Law & Order, Arrested Development, and Psych, as well as the Peabody Award-winning documentary Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four. As an instructor, Tesón teaches young people the art of filmmaking and radio with organizations such as the Traveling Film Institute and Texas Folklife, where he was the director of the award-winning Stories from Deep in the Heart, a radio program for teachers. He is founder and director of the Creative Action Youth Cinema Collective, a program that brings young people from all over Austin to make socially relevant cinema. In 2016, the collective won the South by Southwest Community Award for their work lifting up the youth voices of Central Texas. A first-generation immigrant from Argentina, Tesón is currently in post- production on his first feature film as director, Touchy-Feely, which is scheduled for release in 2023.
Daniel Bird Tobin is a director, performer, science communicator, and theatre archaeologist. He has performed solo shows across the United States and in England (An Iliad and Conqueror of the Western Marches are two favorites). Tobin has worked with fabulous artists, such as Liz Lerman, Danai Gurira, and Aaron Landsman, and assisted the amazing directors Emily Mann, John Doyle, and Sam Buntrock. A graduate of the master’s degree in performance program at Arizona State University, Tobin has trained and worked with Dance Exchange, the SITI Company, Tectonic Theatre Project, and the Globe Theatre in London. Currently, he is a theatre specialist in the English Department at Saint Anselm College and a Senior Faculty Fellow in the Center for Communicating Science at Virginia Tech. DanielBirdTobin.com.
