ANNA SHNEIDERMAN is committed to working at the intersection of theatre, education, social justice and social entrepreneurship. Her training includes work with Augusto Boal, Michael Rohd, SITI company, Jeffrey Bihr, The Dell’arte School, and ZenZenZo as well as a BA from the University of Chicago and a Masters in Teaching from UC Berkeley.  Prior to founding Ragged Wing, she worked at Bread and Puppet, Redmoon Theatre, Steppenwolf, and the Williamstown Theater Festival.  As a teacher, she created, directed and grew the theater program at Envision Academy, a public, charter high school in Oakland and is the founder and director of the Ragged Wing Youth Ensemble as well as a current teaching artist for California Shakespeare Theater.  Anna has participated in each of Ragged Wing’s professional and youth shows as a director, performer or producer, including creating the signature fall festival event.  Both as an artist and as an organizational leader, Anna focuses on designing unique structures of collaboration that bring divergent voices into dialogue and create opportunities for connection.

AMY SASS As playwright, director, actor, choreographer, and visual artist, Amy brings a fierce voracity to her creative practice. Her early training in classical acting, avant-garde performance, puppetry, mask, and dance set the foundation of artistic rigor that has become the cornerstone of RWE’s ethic and aesthetic. A member of Playwright’s PlayGround, she has won the People’s Choice Award for her short plays: Significant Peopleand Structural Instability as well as the June Anne Baker Commission Award. Her plays have appeared in PlayGround’s Spring Festival, the Bay Area One Acts, Fury Factory and the Eugene O’Neill Foundation Selected Shorts. She specializes in creating new methods of artistic collaboration and story building, designing RWE’s multidisciplinary approach to the development of original work. A passionate teacher and a fierce arts advocate, she has taught theater to youth at many Bay Area institutions, most notably as the Founder and Director of Prospect Sierra School’s vibrant Drama Program. Most recent Writer/Director credits include: Time Sensitive, Maybe Baby, OPEN, Handless, No Outlet (a short film) andSo Many Ways To Kill A Man. She is pleased to be featured at Mercury 20 for her collaboration with Eric Bohr creating the art installation:Everything Is Permanent. Other collaborators include: Mettle Theater, C.A.F.E, Fool’s Fury, Bald Productions and Shotgun Players. In all her endeavors, Amy works from the gut, using theater & art as vehicles for healing, empowerment and social change.

KEITH CORY DAVIS began studying theater at the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston and continued at the University of Northern Colorado, majoring in both acting and directing. He has been in the Bay Area since 1997 performing with many theater companies. With RWE, Keith has performed in The Serpent, Splinters… and Other F-Words, Alice in Wonderland, Clive Barker’s The History of the Devil, Handless, Open, Maybe Baby, Inanna’s Descent, and Time Sensitive. He also directed Ragged Wing’s The Tempest, and The Clearing (Fierce Play 2014). As a director and teacher, he has worked with Ragazzi Peninsula Boys Choir, Education Unlimited Acting Intensive in Berkeley, Albany High School and MLK Middle School. Keith currently teaches Drama at Prospect Sierra School. He has appeared in several independent films, including “Weapon of Mass Destruction,” “Greed” and Pulse Films’ “The Collapsing Wall.”

ERIK LADUE studied Design at UC Santa Cruz’s Theater Arts department, where he received his BA in their undergraduate program and then a Certificate in Performance Studies from their graduate studies program. While at UCSC, Erik worked as a designer for many student directed works, as well as productions with established directors Kinan Valdez forMummified Deer, Danny Scheie for Orestes Terrorist , and Kirsten Brandt for her piece The Thinning Veil. Since become a part of the Bay Area theater community, his set design work as been seen at Ragged Wing Ensemble’s multi-site Within The Wheel as well as their Fierce Plays (Winter ’13) and their production of Time Sensitive. His design credits also include:Next to Normal (Custom Made Theater Co.) Aladdin Kids (Marin Theater Company), Dark Play (DoItLive! Productions), Dancing at Lughnasa (Jewish Community High School of the Bay), Pride and Prejudice (Poison Apple Productions), and Superior Donuts (Custom Made Theater Co.)  Erik is also the recipient of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Richard L. Hay Design Fellowship, for which he worked as an assistant in OSF’s Design Studio under resident designer Richard Hay.

CECILIA PALMTAG cut her teeth directing Charles Ludlam’s Stage Blood at the age of 17.  Later she helmed original play festivals, and an open mic series at Cabrillo College. Her directorial credits include: Harold Pinter’s The Lover (Off Broadway West), Paul  Baird’sWhite Knuckled Driver (Eureka Theater), a full length ensemble adaptation of Marlowe and Goethe’s works entitled Faust: a Shadow Pact (SFSU), Plastic Earth: A Radiohead Musical(SFSU), an original clown piece Standard Stoppages: The Seduction of Duchamp (Velocity Circus), and Picassolocity: Six periods through a circus eye at the De Young Museum. She has stage managed dozens of works including classical theater, corporate events, dance concerts and variety cabarets. With honors, she completed her BA in Drama from San Francisco State University in 2008 with a focus in classical acting, and in the summer of 2010 was invited to study with the Moscow Art Theater School in Cambridge, MA.  Roles have included the title characters in Hedda Gabler and Sylvia, Ivana Fyodorovna in The Karamazovs, Cassandra in Troy: The Gates of Hell, and ensemble in Amy Sass’s OPEN. Her recent foray into music composition for the original musical Love Myths was well received as a Resident Artist Workshop at The Garage in 2010.  She is currently serving as Artistic Associate at Gregangelo and Velocity Circus learning how to juggle the business of entertainment.

DAVID STEIN is  a performer, writer, director and installation artist. His first performed with Ragged Wing in Alice in Wonderland (2007). He returned in 2010 as a core artist as a performer in Persephone’s Roots, OPEN (2011), Atomic Intuition (2012), Maybe Baby (2012) and Within the Wheel (2013). He went on to write & direct original short plays: A Fool’s Errand (The Fortune Project, 2012), A Hard Way to Fall (Within the Wheel), In the Blink (Fierce Play, 2013) and Spooning Leads to Forking (Fierce Play, 2014). As a RWE core artist, he was able to develop his skills as a visual artist where he took on a role of interactive site designer forInanna’s Descent: The Underworld (2012) and Buried in the Body: Here. There. (2013). In addition, he has performed with and directed for a number of other local companies including Killing My Lobster, Subterranean Shakespeare, California Shakespeare Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Shotgun Players and Wily West. He is a member of SAG-AFTRA and a 15 year SAG Bookpal, where he currently read-performs at Children’s Fairyland and Berkeley Arts Magnet Elementary during the school year.

ADDIE ULREY was raised by farmers, house painters, meditators, and real-life radicals in Charlotte, Michigan. She holds a BA in theatre from Oberlin College, and has trained at the Eugene O’Neill Center, the Moscow Art Theatre, and Double Edge Theatre laboratory. In the spring of 2010 she moved west to seek her fortune. Since then she has been working with RWE in many capacities. She has written two short original pieces that were performed as part of the Fierce Play Series (Fish Tank Piece, How to Ripen), adapted myth for the fall festival (Inanna’s Descent), and worked with the youth ensemble to create two full length pieces  (America Who?, The Hourglass). Her piece Portrait of the Young Artist as a Young Artist represented Ragged Wing at the Factory Parts works-in-progress festival in San Francisco in July of 2013. She’s been seen performing with the ensemble in Persephone’s Roots, Time Sensitive, and Maybe Baby.

I would also like to acknowledge the passing of one of our own, Phil Wharton, a longtime core member of RWE who passed away at home on Valentines Day (2015) after several years living and working with cancer.

A treasure of a man, Phil was an artist to his core. He performed with us in The Tempest, Persephone's Roots, Open, Inanna's Descent, Maybe Baby, and Time Sensitive. He wrote and directed The Music Tree and performed in many one-man shows of his own devising including The Gospel of St. Mark, Beowulf, and Dostoevsky's The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.

Undaunted by illness, Phil performed until his final days, even in his bed at home for family and friends. Phil was a lover of philosophy, art, myth, botany, ancient languages and natural sciences. He was a daring, open-minded soul who brought a profound center to our storm of artists. He had a wonderful sense of humor, freedom, sensitivity and artistic risk. He approached his death with interest and curiosity, making a point to share his process with us as yet another stage in his artistic journey.

Thank you, Phil, for all your many gifts. You have taught us much and we wish you well on your travels. 

 

Amy Sass

Artistic Director

 

ANTHONY CLARVOE is an award-winning playwright and San Francisco native who recently, very happily, returned home to the Bay Area. His plays include Pick Up Ax, The Living, Let’s Play Two, The Brothers Karamazov, Ambition Facing West, Ctrl+Alt+Delete and The Art Of Sacrifice; they are published by Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. While living and working in the Bay Area he received the Will Glickman, Bay Area Drama Critics’ Circle and Dramalogue Awards and an American Theatre Critics Awards Citation for Pick Up Ax, as well as the Stavis Award from the National Theatre Council as the promising playwright of the year. Since then he’s been roaming the country, writing plays and raising a family. He has received twenty commissions from South Coast Repertory, the Mark Taper Forum, Playwrights’ Horizons, and others; fellowships from the Guggenheim, McKnight, Jerome, and Irvine Foundations, National Endowment for the Arts, TCG/Pew Charitable Trusts and Kennedy Center/Fund for New American Plays; the Berrilla Kerr Award in recognition of his contributions to the American theater; and critics’ awards from LA to New England. His play Show and Tellrecently played to rave reviews in San Francisco in a production by the newly formed Symmetry Theatre Company. His most recent play, Our Practical Heaven, was one of the winners of the 2011 Global Age Project at the Aurora Theatre, where it premiered last season. In 2012, his play GIZMO appeared at Pennsylvania Center Theatre and in Cutting Ball’s Risk Is This festival.

CHAMPAGNE HUGHES, Facilities Manager for The Flight Deck, is a multi-talented artist and entrepreneur with a B.A in Theatre Arts & Administration. She looks forward to establishing a stronger community in the arts and motivate others to act freely in their passion.

 

 

(Previously  Adam Tantillo)

 

2014-2015 PROFESSIONAL APPRENTICES

Azya Barron
Nick Louie
Amanda Artru
Mikka Bonel
Sango Tajima
Puja Tolton

ARTISTIC ASSOCIATES

Amanda Bornstein
DiLecia Childress
Aidan Fraser
Mario Gonzales
Robert Hickling
Mateo Hinojosa
Jenny Holland
Laura Inserra
Joe Lamb
Serena Morelli
MK Nelson
Shannon Ratay
Tamara Roberts
Julia Robertson
Kelly Sanchez
Rory Terrell
Sabrina Wenske