NEPHELIE ANDONYADIS

(Designer) With a background in performance and architecture, Nephelie Andonyadis made the transition to stage design at Yale University’s  School of Drama where she earned her MFA.  She was an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan and joined the faculty of University of Redlands in 2001. Concurrent with her teaching, she maintains actively engaged with many regional and ensemble theatre companies with whom she designs sets and/or costumes. As an Associate Artist with Cornerstone, she has designed Jason in Eureka, Los Illegals, 3/7/11: A Lincoln Heights Tale, Boda de Luna Nueva and Sid Arthur.  Through her ongoing relationship with South Coast Repertory, she has designed in every season since 1998 including the currently running Saturn Returns.  Other theatres include Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Portland Center Stage, Center Theatre Group, The Acting Company, The Guthrie Lab, The Court theatre and many others. She is the recipient of the University of Redlands’ Hunsaker Innovative Teaching Award and the NEA/TCG Design Fellowship.

ALISON CAREY

(Playwright, Co-Founder) Alison has written or co-written over 25 of the company's productions, and been nominated for Emmy, GLAAD and Ovation awards. A member of the Dramatists Guild, she has served on advisory or peer panels for organizations such as The Ford Foundation, Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation, the Mark Taper Forum's Other Voices Projects, and Arts Midwest. She has guest lectured at universities and organizations around the country, including at Yale, Stanford, and the BAM/CUNY Shakespeare Conference, and taught courses at the University of Southern California and CalState LA in playwriting and community-based theater. Alison and her husband, associate artist Benajah Cobb, have two children.

JULIETTE CARRILLO

(Director) For Cornerstone, Juliette has directed community collaborations Los Faustinos by Bernardo Solano, As Vishnu Dreams by Shishir Kurup and Lethe by Octavio Solis, as well as Literature-to-Life productions The House on Mango Street and Warriors Don't Cry. Juliette was an Artistic Associate at South Coast Repertory Theatre for seven years. She directed regularly in their season and ran the Hispanic Playwright's Project, collaborating with Latino writers across the country. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, she has directed theater extensively throughout the US. Some of her favorite collaborations have been directing the West Coast premiere of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize winner, Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz at South Coast Repertory, the World Premiere of References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot by Jose Rivera, also at South Coast Repertory, and the West Coast premiere of Sam Shepard's Eyes for Consuela at the Magic in San Francisco. She has directed for the Alliance Theatre, TheatreWorks, Laguna Playhouse, New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, Actor's Theatre of Louisville and for the Mark Taper Forum's New Work Festival, as well as workshops in New York theatres such as New York Theatre Workshop, The Public, INTAR and The Women's Project. Juliette is a recipient of several awards, including the prestigious National Endowment of the Arts/Theatre Communications Group Directing Fellowship and the Princess Grace Award. She also participated in American Film Institute's Directing Workshop for Women, where she wrote and directed her first short film, Spiral, which played in nine film festivals around the country and in Europe, garnering finalist recognition in several. She is currently writing a full-length screenplay and developing several theater projects in the Los Angeles and Bay areas.

PAULA DONNELLY

(Institute Director) Paula began working with Cornerstone in 1998 as a stage manager and joined Cornerstone's Ensemble in 1999. Community-collaborations she has stage managed for the company include Los Biombos in Boyle Heights, AKA in Beverly Hills, For Here or To Go?, a city-wide bridge show, at the Mark Taper Forum, Peter Pan in Cleveland, and Crossings at St Vibiana's Cathedral in downtown Los Angeles and the Festival of Faith. She also was the stage manager for Cornerstone Ensemble shows Foot/Mouth (produced in multiple malls around Southern California) and Erik Ehn's Mary Shelley's Santa Claus. As a stage manager she has worked on a variety of productions with Taper, Too, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Milwaukee Repertory Theater, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, PCPA TheaterFest and other regional theaters. As Institute Director for the company, Paula plans and produces the annual Institute Summer Residency and 2-Day Intensives. Through the Institute Summer Residencies, Paula's love for Cornerstone and California's people and places has increased exponentially.

MARCENUS "M.C." EARL

(Actor) M.C. first came to Cornerstone as a community member back in 1993 during the company's Watts Residency when he appeared in Love of a Nightingale and Breaking Plates. Other community collaborations M.C. has appeared in include Broken Hearts, For Here or To Go?, For All Time and the ongoing Beyond the Diagnosis, Cornerstone's partnership with Gilead Sciences, Inc. to promote HIV/AIDS awareness through theatre. M.C. is a graduate of USIU San Diego's BFA Acting Program.

MICHAEL JOHN GARCÉS

(Artistic Director) For Cornerstone, Michael has directed Someday by Julie Marie Myatt, attraction by Page Leong, and The Falls by Jeffrey Hatcher (at the Guthrie Theater), and will be directing Naomi Iizuka’s 3 Truths, the Bridge show of the Justice Cycle, this June at Grand Performances.  He also wrote Los Illegals, the first play of the Justice Cycle, created in collaboration with communities of day laborers and domestic workers and which was subsequently produced by Teatro Bravo in Phoenix, Arizona.  Other directing credits include, most recently, Funnyhouse of a Negro by Adrienne Kennedy at CalArts and the break/s by Marc Bamuthi Joseph, which co-premiered at the Humana Festival (Actors Theatre of Louisville) and the Walker Art Center, and which toured the U.S. to venues such as REDCAT, Under the Radar and The August Wilson Center for African American Culture.  Other theatres at which he has directed include A Contemporary Theater, Hartford Stage, Woolly Mammoth, New York Theatre Workshop, The Children's Theatre Company, Second Stage, Huntington Theatre Company, Yale Repertory Theatre, The Cherry Lane, The Atlantic Theater Company and Repertorio Español.   He has twice been in residence with a consensus-run collective, Sna Jtz'ibajom, in Chiapas, Mexico, collaborating in the creation of community-engaged work with members of the Mayan community.  Michael is on the executive board of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society and serves on the Ovation review Committee for the Los Angeles Stage Alliance. His full-length plays include points of departure (INTAR Hispanic American Arts Center) and Acts of Mercy (Rattlestick Playwrights Theater); short plays include tostitos, (Ensemble Studio Theatre Marathon of One-Act Plays) on edge and the ride (Humana, "The Open Road Anthology"), audiovideo (The Directors Project) and sandlot ball (Mile Square). His solo performance piece, agua ardiente, ran Off-Broadway at The American Place Theatre, and he performed in and wrote for "The Borges Project", which was presented at the Cultural Center of the Philippines for the 31st World Congress of the International Theatre Institute (UNESCO).  He collaborated with composer Alexandra Vrebalov on the oratorio Stations, which received its premiere at the Rhode Island Civic Chorale and Orchestra and was recently performed at the NOMUS Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia.  Michael is a recipient of the Princess Grace Statue, the Alan Schneider Director Award, and a TCG/New Generations Grant. He is a resident playwright at New Dramatists.

SIGRID GILMER

(Playwright) Sigrid’s full-length plays include The Great White Way, Ball Game, Slavey and Axiom. The Great White Way began at the Flea Theatre’s Pataphysics Workshop led by Paula Vogel, in March of 2006.  A workshop production was produced in Los Angeles at the Metro Gallery and as part of Exquisite Acts and Everyday Rebellion-Cal Arts Feminist Art Project. Sigrid has worked with Cornerstone Theater (The Brothers, 2009; A Space Between, 2008; Phantoms at my Table, 2008; Head Trip, 2008; The Sweep, 2007), Watts Village Theatre Company (Axiom, 2008). Clubbed Thumb Theatre Company (Slavey, 2008) and Playwriting Center of Theatre Emory (Brave New Works, 2009). Ms. Gilmer has a BA in theatre from Cal State LA (1997), where she studied with Jose Cruz-Gonzalez, and a MFA in playwriting from Cal Arts (2005), where she was mentored by Suzan-Lori Parks and Erik Ehn. Before graduate school she lived in New York where she worked as a theatre administrator at HERE Arts Center (1998-2002). Sigrid has been a Jerome, PONY Fellowship, New Victory Garden’s IGNITION, and Kesselring finalist (2006, 2007 & 2008). She has studied theatre in Japan, Rwanda and the University of Iowa. Current obsessions include:  American history, Reality TV, whiteness, the mind and the Misfits.  Sigrid lives in Los Angeles.

PETER HOWARD

(Actor, Playwright) Peter is a founding member of Cornerstone Theater Company. Born and raised in Massachusetts, he graduated from Harvard College with a degree in English and American Literature and holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Department of Drama of the University of Virginia. With Cornerstone, Peter has performed in, written or otherwise collaborated on scores of productions in Los Angeles and around the country. As a playwright, his Cornerstone credits include Zones (an original, audience-interactive play exploring interfaith themes), an American Muslim adaptation of You Can't Take It with You (the first adaptation ever approved by the Kaufman and Hart estate) and a bilingual adaptation of Lorca's Blood Wedding (Boda de Luna Nueva: New Moon Wedding, created for the small California agricultural communities of Western Stanislaus County as part of the company's 2005 Summer Institute). His regional theater work includes productions at the Mark Taper Forum, Williamstown Theatre Festival, American Repertory Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, Long Wharf, and Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Peter has served on staff of the National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ), working as a facilitator, playwright and director in a variety of youth arts programs that use theater as a springboard for dialogue on challenging human relations topics. He has directed the participatory youth script development and performance programs of a number of regional theatres including the Mark Taper Forum (The Speak to Me program) and Shakespeare Festival/LA (Will Power to Youth). Peter is also the author of three plays (collectively known as the Compassion Plays series) now touring southern California high schools, colleges and community groups through ENCOMPASS, a youth development organization based in the San Gabriel Valley: Wheels explores youth attitudes toward immigration; Kick explores the Native American mascot issue in high school sports; Horizon Line explores the root causes and impact of bias-motivated crime.

NIKKI HYDE

(Stage Manager) Nikki began her relationship with Cornerstone as a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed LA County intern in 2005 during the Faith Cycle Bridge show, A Long Bridge Over Deep Waters. Shortly after completing a stage management fellowship at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival three years later, she returned to her CTC roots by working on the stage management teams of For All Time, Touch the Water, On Caring for the Beast, and the Justice Cycle Bridge show, 3 Truths.  She has had the pleasure of working on Broadway, as well as with Center Theatre Group, Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles, Greenway Court Theatre and Company of Angels, among other LA theatres.  She has also worked as a production assistant on Desperate Housewives. A proud Michigan native and a graduate of the University of Southern California, Nikki enjoys volunteering for 826LA and KPFK’s The Global Village when she’s not doing all of the above.

LYNN JEFFRIES

(Costume/Scenic/Puppet Designer) Lynn is a founding member of the company. In Cornerstone's rural traveling years from 1986 to 1991, she designed both sets and costumes for almost every show, from Our Town in Newport News, VA, to the national tour of The Winter's Tale, an Interstate Adventure. She is proud to be the only theatrical designer whos work has been featured on the Norcatur (Kansas) Grain Company Calendar. Since moving to L.A. with the company in 1992, she has designed sets, costumes or puppets for over forty Cornerstone productions.  She has also designed at several regional theaters, including The Guthrie, South Coast Repertory, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival.  As a puppeteer, Lynn performs short solo shadow puppet plays in nightclubs with the band, The Ditty Bops, and she has an ongoing collaboration with puppeteer/performance artist Paul Zaloom, building puppets for The Mother of All Enemies, co-creating  and co-performing The Alphabet Show, and performing in the toy theater film, Dante's Inferno.  Lynn and Paul were lead artists on  Beyond the Beyond: The Gay FutureWorld! a Cornerstone collaboration with gay youth and gay seniors.  Lynn has taught as a guest lecturer on shadow puppetry or design for community-specific theater at Cal State Los Angeles, USC, UCLA, University of Redlands, Southern Oregon University, Cal Arts, and Towson State University.  She is an instructor at the Cornerstone Institute.

GEOFF KORF

(Lighting Designer) Geoff has worked professionally as a freelancelighting designer for the past twenty years. His designs have appeared on Broadway as well as at many regional theatres including The Mark Taper Forum, South Coast Repertory, The Geffen Playhouse, La Jolla Playhouse, The Old Globe, Long Beach Opera, The Minneapolis Children's Theatre Company, Actor's Theatre of Louisville, Seattle Repertory Theatre, The Goodman Theatre, and The Kennedy Center in Washington DC. Geoff first came to Cornerstone as the lighting designer for Rushing Waters in 1992. Since then he has designed more than 20 Cornerstone productions including: An Antigone Story, Los Biombos/The Screens,and For Here or To Go? Geoff is the head of the design program at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he teaches lighting design. He is a native of Southern California, and a graduate of California State University, Chico, and the Yale School of Drama.

SHISHIR KURUP

(Actor, Director, Writer, Composer) Born in Bombay, India and raised in Mombasa, Kenya, Shishir holds an MFA in acting from The Conservatory at University of California at San Diego. He has studied the Suzuki actor training method in Japan with the internationally acclaimed Tadashi Suzuki and was a student of Anne Bogart. Shishir wrote and directed Ghurba, Cornerstone's Arab residency production, as part of the Los Angeles Festival, and directed and composed songs for the site-specific hit Candude, or the Optimistic Civil Servant. He also wrote and composed songs for the Watts production of Sid Arthur and the company's tenth anniversary production of Birthday of the Century. He is a recipient of the Princess Grace Award for Theater, as well as Garland awards for acting and composing. Shishir's many film and television credits as an actor include ER and the film City of Angels.

PAGE LEONG

(Actor, Director, Choreographer) Page joined Cornerstone's ensemble in 1994, performing in over thirty company productions and garnering DramaLogue and Garland awards, and LA Weekly and Ovation nominations for her work as an actor, and most recently as a playwright. Favorite roles include Antigone, Medea, Nina and Olivia. Film/TV credits include Dragnet, The Practice, ER, Judging Amy, Strong Medicine, Felicity, Another 48HRS and JAG, among others. Page directed Shishir Kurup's one-man shows Assimilation and Exile, his play Sid Arthur, and her first short film, Glimpse. She is most enthusiastic about a special collaboration with Shishir, their daughter Tala.

ANDRES MUNAR

(Guest Ensemble Member; Fox Foundation / TCG Resident Actor) Like a good sake on a cold winter's day, Andres has been known to create warm, fuzzy feelings from here to Budapest, to his native Colombia, and back. Previously at Cornerstone, Andres was part of the amazing ensemble of Los Illegals, directed by Shishir Kurup and penned by Michael John Garcés. Theater credits include: Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, The Lark Play Development Center, NYTW, INTAR, The Cherry Lane, Hip Hop Theater Festival, Edge Theater Company, NAATCO, and HERE Arts Center. Andres has been very funny in TV dramas that aren't supposed to be, sad in commercials that are, and is excited but ever-so nauseous to debut on the big screen in 2008, in Steven Soderbergh's Cuban Revolution biopic, The Argentine.

JULIE MARIE MYATT

(Playwright) Julie Marie Myatt's play Someday, premiered as part of Cornerstone's Justice Cycle in 2008. Her play, The Happy Ones recently premiered at South Coast Repertory. Her play, Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter has been playing at small theatres across the country after premiering at Oregon Shakespeare Festival; a tour of that production went to the Kennedy Center as part of the Center's Fund for New American Plays. Her play, My Wandering Boy premiered at South Coast Repertory in 2007, was part of the Pacific Playwrights Festival and was produced in New York as part of the 2007 Summer Play Festival. Her play, Boats on a River premiered at the Guthrie Theater, was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and was recorded for the LA Theatre Works radio play series, "The Play's The Thing." Her ten-minute play, Mr. and Mrs. premiered at the 2007 Humana Festival. Her play, The Sex Habits of American Women was produced by the Guthrie Theatre, Signature Theater in Arlington, VA, among others, and premiered at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. Her work has been developed or seen at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Seattle Rep, Cherry Lane, A.S.K. Theatre Projects, LAByrinth Theater Company, Denver Center Theatre, among others. She received a Walt Disney Studios Screenwriting Fellowship, a Jerome Fellowship at the Playwrights' Centeer, and a McKnight Advancement Grant. She is currently working on commissions for ACT Seattle, Roundabout Theatre, and Yale Repertory. She is a resident member of New Dramatists.

TALI PRESSMAN

Tali joins the Ensemble after joining Cornerstone's staff in summer 2007. Most recently she was the Special Projects Director at Progressive Jewish Alliance (PJA) where she was responsible for strategic outreach to twenty and thirty-somethings, branding and major public programming. In 2003 while at PJA Tali created and secured funding for the Jeremiah Fellowship, a year-long program that educates and trains emerging Jewish social justice leaders, now in its third year. She helped expand the Jeremiah Fellowship to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006. In June 2007 she was awarded The Mark Meltzer New and Innovative Programming Award from the Jewish Communal Professionals of Southern California for her creation of the Jeremiah Fellowship. She also produced PJA's annual event Vodka Latka: Festival of Rights that brought together culture and social justice through musical performances and a candle lighting with local activists, politicians and artists. In 2005 Vodka Latka was produced in San Francisco, New York and Boston. Prior to PJA, Tali was the Director of Yiddishkayt Los Angeles where she created and spearheaded the AVADA Initiative, an innovative project to engage people under 35 in Yiddish language and culture. Her 2003 screening of The Dybbuk at Hollywood Forever Cemetery attracted more than 800 people. Tali is a participant of Reboot, a non-profit organization dedicated to exploring contemporary Jewish culture, and previously the Los Angeles coordinator. A graduate of University of California at Santa Cruz, she studied theater and Modern Literature. She has studied writing, acting, and directing for years.

BILL RAUCH

(Founding Artistic Director) Bill Rauch co-founded Cornerstone in 1986 and has directed over 40 of the company's productions, including the majority of the company's community collaborations nationwide. He has also directed at regional theaters across the country including Yale Repertory, Guthrie Theatre, Arena Stage, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, South Coast Repertory, Long Wharf Theatre and Great Lakes Theater Festival. For his directorial efforts, Bill has received L.A. Weekly, Drama-Logue, Garland, and Helen Hayes Awards, Connecticut Critics Circle Award (for Best Direction), and has been twice nominated for the Ovation Award for Best Director. From 1992 to 1998, he served on the Board of Directors of Theatre Communications Group, the national service organization for non-profit theater (two years as a member of the Executive Committee). He graduated from Harvard College in 1984 where he received the Louis Sudler Prize for outstanding graduating artist. He has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, The Durfee Foundation and the Playwrights Center and Keynote Speaker for Theatre Puget Sound's inaugural conference and has testified before Congress in support of the NEA. Bill is the only artist to have received the inaugural Leadership for a Changing World Award. He is an Associate Artist at Yale Repertory Theater and South Coast Repertory and a Claire Trevor Professor of Drama at University of California, Irvine. Most recently, Bill has been appointed the incoming Artistic Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

BAHNI TURPIN

(Actor) Bahni trained at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, and later at the Lee Strassberg Theatre Institute. While in NY she appeared in productions at Crossroads Theater, American Place Theater, New York Renaissance Festival, and also began her film and television career with appearances on Law and Order and in the films Daughters of the Dust, The Saint of Fort Washington, Rain Without Thunder, Getting In, and Theory of Acheivement. Since moving to LA Bahni has become a Yoga teacher, and has had numerous guest spots on television including E.R., Judging Amy, Seinfeld, The Parkers, Star Trek Voyager, and Girlfriends to name a few. Some additional film credits include Brokedown Palace and Crossroads. Bahni has also had the good fortune to participate in a number of theatrical productions in Los Angeles. She was awarded a Dramalogue award for her work in Mules at the Mark Taper Forum and has appeared in several other productions at the Taper. Just prior to joining Cornerstone, Bahni became a working finalist at The Actors Studio. In joining Cornerstone, Bahni hopes to cover some new ground and bring her work to more people in new ways.

LAURIE WOOLERY

(Associate Artistic Director) Laurie is the Associate Artistic Director of Cornerstone Theater Company. As a director and playwright, she has collaborated on many new works including Jason in Eureka written by Peter Howard as part of the sixth Cornerstone Institute Summer Residency in Eureka, California, For All Time written by KJ Sanchez as part of the Justice Cycle, A Holtville Night's Dream written by Alison Carey as part of the Cornerstone Institute Summer Residency in Holtville, California, 3/7/11: A Lincoln Heights Tale written by Jose Cruz Gonzalez and the students of Loreto Elementary, Nightingale Middle School and Lincoln High School as part of Cornerstone's first Youth Community Collaboration. Cornerstone Theater Company commissioned her solo play Salvadorian Moon/African Sky for its citywide Festival of Faith. Several of her plays Scouting Reality, Bliss, The Hundred Dresses and Orphan Train: The Lost Children have received world premieres at South Coast Repertory. As a director, playwright, educator and actor, Laurie has worked at South Coast Repertory (most recently as Director of the Theatre Conservatory), Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Theatre Center, Ricardo Montalban Theatre, Deaf-West Theatre, fofo Theatre, Highways Performance Space, A Noise Within, Sundance Playwrights Lab as well as the Sundance Children's Theatre. Ms. Woolery worked with Bill Rauch on the world premiere of Lisa Loomer's Living Out at the Mark Taper Forum and SCR's Lovers and Executioners. She directed Amor Eterno - Six Lessons in Love (an anthology by six Latino playwrights) for the grand opening of the Ricardo Montalban Theatre. She also directed Bryan Davidson's Reflecting Back at the Los Angeles Central Library as part of the National Tour of the American Originals exhibit and Richard Coca's solo piece The Day I Flipped Off Jimmy Carter for SCR's Hispanic Playwrights Project. She is a long time artist with the Virginia Avenue Project and artist-in-residence for Hollygrove Children's Home. Laurie is on faculty at California Institute of the Arts, Citrus College and Glendale College and serves on the Board of the Network of Ensemble Theaters.