2018 EMOS Staff
Chair, EMOS 2018
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Dr. Cook is the chair of the Earth Matters on Stage New Play Festival and Symposium 2018. He is an assistant professor of theatre at the University of Alaska Anchorage, where he directs and teaches theatre history, dramaturgy, and directing. His research focuses on contemporary British theatre, and he has recently published on the work of the Cherub Company in the United Kingdom and abroad between 1978 and 2003. He has presented at conferences in the U.S., U.K., and Canada, and published articles and book reviews in, Theatre History Studies, Theatre Survey, Performing Arts Resources and the LMDA Sourcebook. He has served as a contributing editor to Theatre History Studies, as well as co-editor of a special section in the 2018 volume on politics, theatre, and change. In 2017, he was elected to serve as the new treasurer of the Mid-America Theatre Conference.
Kimberly Allely
Production Assistant, EMOS 2018​
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Kimberly Allely is the Production Assistant for the Earth Matters on Stage New Play Festival and Symposium 2018 . She is a legal studies and theatre student at the University of Alaska Anchorage. For theatre, Kimberly's focus is performing. Notable roles include: Caroline in Anchorage Community Theatre's The Best of Everything, Eurydice in UAA Theatre's Eurydice, and Tammy in Debbie Does Dallas: The Musical at Mad Myrna's, as well as Jenny in the short film Round One with Normal People Productions. Kimberly also acts as manager and member of UAA's improv troupe The Ad-lib Alchemists. When not performing, Kimberly can be found behind a desk at Alaska Dance Theatre as the Office Manager.
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Taran Haynes
Production Assistant, EMOS 2018​
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Taran Haynes is a theatre major at UAA and an aspiring performer, director, and playwright. He has been on the UAA stage in Radium Girls (Tom Kreider, Reporter), Picasso at the Lapin Agile (Albert Einstein), Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (Phillip Lombard), Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer) and Spam-a-lot (Not-Dead-Fred). He also served as production dramaturg for Stalking the Bogeyman and assistant director in 44 Plays for 44 Presidents. Writing a Play, Taran’s first one-act, was accepted to the Play Lab of the 2017 Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez, AK, and his 10-minute play, The Hardest Thing, was accepted to the Playwriting Symposium of the 2017 Mid America Theatre Conference in Houston, TX, which subsequently earned him a UAA Discovery Grant.
2018 EMOS Judges
Theresa J. May (panel chair) is Associate Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Oregon. As co-founder of EMOS (with Larry Fried), she developed the Ecodrama Playwrights Festival Guidelines and was Artistic Director for the 2009 EMOS Festival at the University of Oregon. She has published widely about the intersections of ecology, cultural and indigenous studies, and performance studies, including "Grotowski's Deep Ecology" in Performing Nature, and "Beyond Bambi: Towards a Dangerous Ecocriticism in Theatre Studies" in a special issue of Theatre Topics on Performance and Ecology. She has published articles in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Theatre Topics, On Stage Studies, American Drama, and Canadian Theatre Review, as well as chapters in several volumes. She co-edited (with Wendy Arons) Readings in Performance and Ecology. She is author of Salmon is Everything, a community-based play from the Klamath Watershed (Oregon State University Press, 2014). She co-authored, with Larry Fried, Greening Up Our Houses (1994), the first book on sustainable theatre management, and was founding artistic director of Theatre in the Wild in Seattle.
Wendy Arons is Professor of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Her research interests include performance and ecology, 18th- and 19th-century theatre history, feminist theatre, and performance and ethnography. She is author of Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Woman's Writing: The Impossible Act (Palgrave Macmillan 2006), and co-editor, with Theresa J. May, of Readings in Performance and Ecology (Palgrave Macmillan 2012). She has published articles in Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, The German Quarterly, Communications from the International Brecht Society, 1650-1850, Text and Presentation, and Theatre Journal, as well as chapters in a number of anthologies, including “Ecodramaturgy in/and Contemporary Women’s Plays” (co-authored with Theresa J. May, and published in Contemporary Women’s Playwriting, ed. Penny Farfan & Leslie Ferris) and "Beyond the Nature/Culture Divide: Challenges from Ecocriticism and Evolutionary Biology for Theatre Historiography" in Theatre Historiography: Critical Questions (ed. Henry Bial & Scott Magelssen). Prof. Arons has served on the Editorial Boards of Theatre Annual and Theatre Topics and on the Advisory Board for Hiawatha Project. She was curator and artistic director of the Earth Matters on Stage Festival & Symposium in Pittsburgh, PA in 2012. And in her spare time, she authors a blog on local theatre and culture, “The Pittsburgh Tatler” (http://wendyarons.wordpress.com).
Vera (Starbard) Bedard was born with Tlingit and Dena’ina heritage and turned to Native culture for writing inspiration. She began editing newspapers in 2000, and made writing and editing part of her work since. Vera completed a fiction book with an award from the Rasmuson Foundation, and received numerous state and national awards for both editing and writing. She is currently First Alaskans Magazine Editor, Dark Winter Productions Co-Founder, and Writing Raven Communications Owner. Vera was awarded a three-year residency with Perseverance Theatre through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s National Playwright Residency Program.
Chantal Bilodeau is a playwright and translator whose work focuses on the intersection of science, policy, art, and climate change. She is the Artistic Director of The Arctic Cycle – an organization created to support the writing, development and production of eight plays that look at the social and environmental changes taking place in the eight countries of the Arctic – and the founder of the blog and international network Artists and Climate Change. She is also a co-organizer of Climate Change Theatre Action, a worldwide series of readings and performance of climate change plays presented to coincide with the United Nations COP meetings. Awards include the Woodward International Playwriting Prize as well as First Prize in the Earth Matters on Stage Ecodrama Festival and the Uprising National Playwriting Competition. She curates the HowlRound series “Theatre in the Age of Climate Change” and has written about the intersection of arts and climate change for American Theatre Magazine, HowlRound, the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences, and the World Policy Institute.
Alison Carey is Director of American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle at Oregon Shakespeare Company, a 10-year initiative to create up to 37 new plays sprung from moments of change, inspiration or conflict in American history, inspired by Shakespeare's history plays and bringing together playwrights, historians and theatres nationwide. Her The Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa, premiered at Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2012. A playwright and co-founder of Cornerstone Theater Company, where she helped to develop the company's signature style of adapting classic plays into modern, community-specific contexts. She wrote more than 25 of the company's productions for stages across the country, including the Mark Taper Forum, Long Wharf Theatre, Arena Stage, Pasadena Playhouse, Yale Repertory Theatre, New York Shakespeare Festival, Great Lakes Theater, the World Shakespeare Conference, the shuttered mother plant of Bethlehem Steel, a dirt-floor cattle sale barn in Oregon and a crowded California shopping mall. Film/ TV: Developed hour-long television pilots for CBS and F/X; script work for Judging Amy. Education: BA, Harvard University.
E. M. Lewis is an award-winning playwright, teacher, and librettist. Her work has been produced around the world, and published by Samuel French. Lewis received the Steinberg Award for Song of Extinction and the Primus Prize for Heads from the American Theater Critics Association, the Ted Schmitt Award from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle for outstanding writing of a world premiere play, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a playwriting fellowship from the New Jersey State Arts Commission, and the 2016 Oregon Literary Fellowship in Drama. Song of Extinction was the winner of the EMOS competition in 2009. Now Comes the Night was part of the Women's Voices Theater Festival in Washington DC, and was published in the anthology Best Plays from Theater Festivals 2016. The Gun Show premiered in Chicago in 2014, and has since been produced in more than a dozen theaters across the country and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland, and it will be published in The Best American Short Plays 2015-2016. Lewis' newest play -- an epic adventure story about climate change set in Antarctica called Magellanica -- will have its world premiere at Artists Repertory Theater in 2018. She has participated in the global Climate Change Theater Action events in 2015 and 2017. Her other plays include: Infinite Black Suitcase, The Study (aka Reading to Vegetables), True Story, and You Can See All the Stars (a play for college students commissioned by the Kennedy Center). Lewis is currently working on two opera commissions, and a big, new political play called The Great Divide. She is a proud member of LineStorm Playwrights, ASCAP, and the Dramatists Guild. She lives on her family’s farm in Oregon.
Randy Reinholz, an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, is founder and Producing Artistic Director of Native Voices at the Autry, the nation’s only Equity theater company dedicated exclusively to the development and production of new plays by Native American, First Nations, and Alaska Native playwrights. He is an accomplished producer, director, actor and playwright. Off The Rails, his bawdy and irreverent adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure was produced in 2015 in Los Angeles and in 2017 at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Bill Rauch directing. He has produced more than 30 plays and directed over 75 plays in the United States, Australia, Mexico, Canada, and Great Britain. A Professor at San Diego State University, where since 1997 he has served as Head of Acting, Director of the School of Theatre, Television, and Film, and Director of Community Engagement and Innovation. Native Voices is the resident theatre company at La Jolla Playhouse, 2016-2018.
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Jonathon Taylor is on the faculty at the University of Nevada, Reno. Bio coming soon.
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