Nephelie Andonyadis
Designer

Nephelie is a theatre artist and teacher, and a member of the Cornerstone ensemble. With a background in performance and architecture, she made the transition to stage design at Yale University’s School of Drama where she earned her M.F.A. She was an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan and is a Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Redlands. She has worked with Cornerstone since 1995 and has designed either scenery or costumes for many plays with many communities across California, including Fellowship, Bliss Point, Café Vida, Jason in Eureka, Plumas Negras, Flor, Los Illegals, Sid Arthur, Boda de Luna Nueva and the touring production of California the Tempest. Designs at regional theatres include South Coast Repertory, Seattle Repertory Theatre (Public Works), The Getty Villa and CAPUcla (with SITI Company), Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Portland Center Stage, Center Theatre Group, The Acting Company, The Guthrie Lab, The Court Theatre and Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble, among others. She is the recipient of the University of Redlands’ Hunsaker Innovative Teaching Award and the NEA/TCG Design Fellowship.

Charlotte Brathwaite
Co- Artistic Director

Charlotte Brathwaite is a creator and director of original genre-defying works that illuminate the realities and dreams of those whose stories have been marginalized,  silenced and ignored. Her trans-disciplinary inquiry manifests as immersive rituals of the body, color and music in collaboration with artists such as Meshell Ndegeochello, Jacqueline Woodson, adrienne maree brown, Abigail DeVille, Justin Hicks, Ayesha Jordan, June Cross, Sunder Ganglani, Peter Sellars, Kyle Abraham and Malick Welli amongst others.  She has received major grants, awards and fellowships including Doris Duke, United States Artists, Art Matters, Creative Capital and the Princess Grace. Her work has been presented at festivals and venues across the globe in North and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. Charlotte is also an educator of the arts and has an MFA in Directing from Yale University.

Shá Cage
Director, Actor

SHA CAGE is a renaissance artist who writes, directs and acts in theater and film.  She has been called a change-maker and one of the leading artists of her generation. Her work has taken her across the U.S. to Japan, Africa, England, Bosnia and Canada.  Her directing credits include 36 Yesses (Cornerstone Theater), Clare Baron’s Dance Nation (Guthrie/UMN), Joselyn Bioh’s School Girls (Arkansas Rep) and (Jungle Theater), Michael Bobbit’s adaptation of Three Little Birds (The Children’s Theater),  Benjamin Benne’s Neighbors (MN History Theater), Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’ Everybody (Guthrie/UMN), Shavunda Horsley’s BITCH (Bedlam Theater), Waterfront’s The Viking and the Gazelle (Mixed Blood Theater) and Buttafly Precinct which she authored (Black Lives/ Black Words Festival). She was seen last on stage as Hermione in Ten Thousand Things Winter’s Tale and Lady Capulet in The Guthrie Theater’s Romeo and Juliet. Recent commissioned poetry and plays she’s written include New Day (Women’s Foundation), Khephra (Open Eye Figure Theater), Hidden Figures (Stages), Butterfly Precinct and Shhh for Cornerstone’s Venice Storytellers.  Her published writings appear in Blues Vision, Locker Room Talk, Home and the anthology A Moment of Silence which she edited. Film credits include: the feature documentary Underbelly that spotlights healing and activism in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, Kiss the Tiger's Grown Ass Woman, New Neighbors (Sundance), horror short; You're Home Now, At the Corner of Experimental Doc series, narrative features Jasmine is a Star, 39 Seconds; The John Donaldson Story, The Guthrie Theater’s Dickens Holiday Classic and Ten Thousand Things Handprints.  Sha is the newest ensemble member of Cornerstone Theater Company and the 2021 inaugural Lloyd Richards New Futures Fellow. She has led racial justice & equity work in community through Tru Ruts for the past 20 years and Film work through Black Star Studios. She’s a proud member of the Playwrights’ Center, the Dramatist Guild, Actor’s Equity, SAG, the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC) and holds TCG, McKnight, Doris Duke, Emmy and Ivey awards.

Juliette Carrillo
Director, Writer

For Cornerstone, Juliette has directed community collaborations Los Faustinos by Bernardo Solano (Watts), As Vishnu Dreams by Shishir Kurup, (Hindu community) Touch the Water by Julie Hebert (LA River community), Lethe by Octavio Solis  (seniors and their caregivers) and It's All Bueno by Sigrid Gilmer (Pacoima). 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  World Premiere of Lydia, by Octavio Solis,  West Coast premiere of  Pulitzer Prize winner, Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz, the World Premiere of References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot by Jose Rivera, and the West Coast premiere of Sam Shepard's Eyes for Consuela. She has directed for South Coast Repertory, the Mark Taper Forum, Seattle Repertory, Denver Theater Center, Yale Repertory Theater, Arizona Theater Company,  Alliance Theatre, TheatreWorks, Laguna Playhouse, New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, Actor's Theatre of Louisville an 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 developing a full-length screenplay and developing several theater projects in the Los Angeles area and nationwide. Plumas Negras is her first full-length play. www.juliettecarrillo.com

Paula Donnelly
Director of Engagement

Paula Donnelly began working with Cornerstone in 1998 as a stage manager and joined Cornerstone's Ensemble in 2000. Community-collaborations she stage managed for Cornerstone 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. 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 with Taper, Too, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Milwaukee Repertory Theater, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, PCPA TheaterFest and other regional theaters. In 2003 Paula became Cornerstone’s Institute Director, planning and producing the annual Institute Summer Residency and Intensives. As Director of Engagement, Paula teaches and shares Cornerstone’s methodology, works to strengthen community relationships post-production, and to contribute to the expansion of community-engagement practices in theater. She helps imagine and implement engagement values in all aspects of our work. Paula loves the state of California, her home city of Los Angeles and the many people and stories contained therein.

Marcenus “M.C.” Earl
Actor

Marcenus M.C. Earl is from Watts, California, where he first said yes to Cornerstone in 1994, and he’s been onstage in at least 20 Cornerstone plays since, as well as AMERYKA with Nancy Keystone and Critical Mass. M.C. earned his B.F.A. in Acting from USIU San Diego.

Sunder Ganglani
Co- Artistic Director

Sunder Ganglani is an artist who works in collaboration between forms: music, theater, civil disobedience, pedagogy, performance. As a former Co-Artistic Director of The Foundry Theater in New York City his works with W. David Hancock, Ariana Reines, Claudia Rankine, David Greenspan, Melanie Joseph and many others have toured nationally and internationally, and won all kinds of awards. More recently his work has focused on music and justice – as a dramaturg he’s made operas and new experiments in music with Esperanza Spalding, Helga Davis, Charlotte Brathwaite, Justin Hicks, and Darius Jones. As a musician, composer, and organizer he’s grateful to have a creative home with The Stop Shopping Choir community in New York City where he works with Billy Talen, Savitri D, and the 45 member choir as chosen family. He’s received grants, fellowships and been awarded residencies, he studied Anthropology at UMass Amherst, Dramaturgy at Yale, and he was raised in Salem, Massachusetts by parents from opposite ends of the earth, and a sister and brother.

Michael Garcia
Associate Producer, Director

Michael is an arts administrator and director that works along the intersection of community- and civic-engaged arts. He works on the Cornerstone artistic staff as Associate Producer, and is a member of the ensemble. Outside of Cornerstone he works with theater artists Mark-n-Sparks on a 10-year art-based civic engagement project that leverages imagination to co-create beautiful solutions to complex social justice and policy issues. In his work he’s traveled nationally and internationally, visiting elementary schools in El Salvador as the Tour Manager for the Activist Dance Theatre company CONTRA-TIEMPO; and as a stage manager for an ice opera festival at The Royal Opera House in Muscat, Oman. Another highlight was touring as stage manager for Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s /peh-LO-tah/ at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Kennedy Center. He went to school at the University of California, Irvine, but started at his local community college, Rio Hondo. He lives in Whittier, CA.

Peter Howard
Actor, Playwright, Director

Peter Howard 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 M.F.A. 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), 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, and Lunch Lady Courage, inspired by Brecht and set in the world of urban public school food service. His regional theater work includes productions at the Mark Taper Forum, Williamstown Theatre Festival, American Repertory Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, Long Wharf, the Guthrie, Woolly Mammoth and South Coast Repertory. In 2011, Peter received a Fox Foundation Resident Actor Fellowship for Distinguished Achievement. Peter also works as a teaching artist, director and facilitator of community dialogue in a variety of Los Angeles youth arts programs. He has served on staff of the National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ), where he created a series of plays for youth audiences that use theater as a springboard for dialogue on challenging human relations topics (such as immigration, bias crimes and the Native American mascot issue), and 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 the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles (Will Power to Youth).  

Nikki Hyde
Stage Manager

Nikki began her relationship with Cornerstone as a LA County Arts Commission intern in 2005 during the Faith Cycle Bridge show, A Long Bridge Over Deep Waters. Since then, Nikki has served on the stage management teams of over 15 Cornerstone shows, spanning multiple play cycles and Institute Summer Residencies. In addition to her work with Cornerstone, she has stage managed at theater and opera companies across the country, including LA Opera, LA Philharmonic, Kennedy Center, Public Theater, San Diego Opera, Ojai Playwrights Conference, South Coast Repertory, Pasadena Playhouse, the Wallis, Cincinnati Opera, Center Theatre Group and MCC Theater. She is a faculty member in the School of Design and Production at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

Lynn Jeffries
Costume/Scenic/Puppet Designer

Lynn Jeffries has been a member of Cornerstone Theater since 1986, and has designed sets, costumes or puppets for over 60 Cornerstone productions. Her regional theater work includes set and costume designs for Arena Stage, The Guthrie, Long Wharf Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and South Coast Repertory. Her puppet designs include Culture Clash's Peace at the Getty Villa, Project Wonderland  at the Bootleg Theater, Thumbelina at Honolulu Theatre for Youth, and To Kill a Mockingbird and Don Quixote at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In an ongoing collaboration with puppeteer/performance artist Paul Zaloom, she has built puppets, dramaturged, designed, and puppeteered on numerous spectacles, including The Mother of All Enemies, The Abecedarium, The Adventures of White-Man, and the film Dante's Inferno. They are currently co-creating a series of satirical puppet videos on YouTube called Santa Controls the World! Lynn has won a Theatre LA Ovation Honor and a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for puppet design; a Backstage West Garland Award and a Drama-Logue Award for scenic design; and a Backstage West Garland Award for costume design.

Geoff Korf
Lighting Designer

Geoff has worked professionally as a free-lance lighting 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?I. 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, Writer, Director, Composer

Shishir is an award-winning director, actor, writer and composer born in Bombay, India and raised in Mombasa, Kenya and the U.S. For Cornerstone’s Hunger Cycle he acted in Café Vida by Lisa Loomer's, directed Seed: A Weird Act of Faith by Sigrid Gilmer, directed Love on San Pedro by James McManus and wrote Bliss Point. In the years before the Hunger Cycle he directed Michael John Garces' first play for Cornerstone, Los Illegals, wrote and directed On Caring for the Beast, was the lyricist for Cornerstone's Making Paradise: The West Hollywood Musical and directed Lynn Manning's The Unrequited in the community of Watts, Los Angeles. He has acted in numerous Cornerstone shows and has written over a 250 songs for various Cornerstone productions. The songs he wrote for the Medea portion of Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella, a production originally created, as collaboration between Cornerstone Theater and The Actor's Gang in 1998, was part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's 2012 season. Over the past four seasons, Shishir has directed Quiara Hudes,’The Happiest Song Plays Last and Water by the Spoonful Director at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He has also directed and acted at regional theaters around the country to name a few: Playmaker’s Rep, Quantum Theatre, Lark Theatre, Silk Road Rising, The Cockpit Theatre, East West Players and Dell” Arte School. A few of Shishir’s acting credits for television and film include: True Blood, NCIS, Bones, Lost, Heroes, Sleeper Cell, NYPD Blue, Monk, Alias, The West Wing, Chicago Hope, E.R., Trigger Effect and Coneheads. Shishir’s theater awards and nominations include: TIME/A.S.K. Award (one of only six nationwide awardees), Princess Grace Apprenticeship Award, Kennedy Center Award, TCG/Alan Schneider Directing Award finalist, two time Herb Alpert Award nominee, L.A. Weekly Award, LA Stage Alliance Ovation Award nominee, Garland Awards, Drama-Logue Awards. Education: BFA, University of Florida, Gainesville. MFA, University of California, San Diego. His one-man shows Assimilation and Exile: Ruminations on a Reluctant Martyr (the latter a commission from Highways Performance Space) have been seen in countless cities and universities nationally and internationally, including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Austin, London and Manchester, England. His essay “In-Between-Space” appears in “Let’s Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance”, published by the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. Assimilation is published by Rutgers Press in the anthology “Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Writing.” He was profiled in author Mei Ling Cheng’s book: “In Other Los Angeleses: Multicentric Performance Art.” His solo performance piece Sharif Don’t Like It examines the fallout from the USA Patriot Act and the disappearance of over two thousand South Asian and Arab Muslims. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Florida, Gainesville and a Master of Fine Arts from University of California, San Diego. His most profound, instructive and daily inspiration, however, is his daughter Tala Claye Ananya Perl Kurup.  

Bruce Lemon
Associate Artistic Director

Bruce Lemon is a storyteller born and raised in Watts, CA. As a child, his father made him write stories and read them aloud in the hallway as punishment for lies and mischief. He’s still in trouble. Host of 89.3 KPCC In-Person’s UnheardLA. Associate Artistic Director/Ensemble with Cornerstone Theater Company. Artistic Director of Watts Village. Company member of Illyrian Players and Collaborative Artists Bloc . Actor, writer, director, producer, creative collaborator. Hobbies include: Holding a mirror up to America, rabble rousing, chasing dreams, working for the reimagining of his community, and listening to the kids.

http://www.brucealemonjr.com/

Page Leong
Actor, Director, Choreographer

John Nobori
Sound Designer

John Nobori is a California-based sound designer and engineer. His work has been heard in plays produced by such organizations as Cornerstone Theater Company, The Getty Villa, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival.  Other recent credits include Center Theatre Group’s production of Elliot: a Soldier’s Fugue and South Coast Repertory’s production of Orange. He has been nominated for several awards for excellence in sound design, including an Ovation Award for his work on The Golden Dragon at Boston Court Pasadena. BA University of California, Irvine. www.noborisound.com

Kenny Ramos
Actor

Kenny Ramos is Diegueño Iipay/Kumeyaay from the Barona Band of Mission Indians.  He started his performing career on the kitchen table of his home on the Barona Indian Reservation in San Diego County and has since followed his passions for theater and learning around the world.  After graduating from UCLA with a BA in American Indian Studies, Kenny worked in the Los Angeles urban Native community, which led to his involvement as a community actor in Cornerstone Theater Company’s 2016 production of Larissa FastHorse’s immersive theatrical event, "Urban Rez", an artistic experience that changed the course of Kenny’s life and career.  After "Urban Rez", Kenny was invited to join the Artist Ensemble at Native Voices at the Autry, the country’s only Equity Native American theater company, where he has performed in numerous readings and workshops of plays written by Native American playwrights at the Autry Museum and at La Jolla Playhouse.  Kenny has also appeared in the world premiere productions of Randy Reinholz’s "Off the Rails" (Oregon Shakespeare Festival), Dillon Chitto’s "Bingo Hall" (Native Voices at the Autry), and Mary Kathryn Nagle’s "Return to Niobrara" (The Kennedy Center, The Rose Theater Omaha).  Other regional credits include: "Crazy for You, High School Musical" (Starlight Bowl); "Joseph…Dreamcoat", "42^nd Street", "Cats, Aida" (Moonlight Stage Productions).  In 2018, Kenny created and performed original pieces about land acknowledgement and two spirit identity at Grand Performances, Southern Oregon University’s "Queer Indigenous Gathering", and UCLA’s "This is Bruin Life" in Pauley Pavilion.  Kenny has also studied Theatre of the Oppressed at the Center for Theatre of the Oppressed in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, Indigenous Contemporary Dance with Dancing Earth in Santa Fe, NM, and also participated in Cornerstone’s 2018 Institute Summer Residency in Queens, NY, where he worked on "The Cardinal: A Journey Through Flushing".  In 2019, Kenny received First Peoples Fund’s Cultural Capital Fellowship, as well as Theater Communications Group’s Fox Foundation Resident Actor Fellowship for Exceptional Merit, in partnership with Cornerstone, becoming the first American Indian actor to receive the award.  The Fox Fellowship will support Kenny’s work on Cornerstone’s upcoming production of Larissa FastHorse’s new decolonial theatrical experience, "Native Nation", and he will join the Cornerstone Ensemble for the duration of his fellowship.  Kenny seeks to increase tribal communities’ access to theatre and to reclaim the use of storytelling and performance as a way to heal and empower Indigenous communities and reconnect everyone to the land that unites us.

Bahni Turpin
Actor

Bahni Turpin has been an ensemble member since 2005. She is an accomplished theater, film, and television actress, as well as a highly acclaimed narrator of audiobooks. Bahni is the founder of SoLA Food Co-op, an organization working to open a full service natural foods store in South Los Angeles. Bahni credits working with Cornerstone, especially during the Hunger Cycle, with giving her inspiration and courage to start the food co-op.

Lu Valero

Lu Valero (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist from Mexico City, based in Los Angeles. She graduated in 2022 from UC Irvine with a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Drama. A visual storyteller and creator with credits in performing arts, photography, graphic design, and more. She started working with Cornerstone Theater Company in 2022 as a Development and Communications intern, transitioning into an administrative associate position later that year. She recently joined the Cornerstone Ensemble and is thrilled to continue her history with the Company. Outside of Cornerstone, she is a Drag Artist known as Mal de Ojo performing all across Los Angeles.

Megan Wanlass
Managing Director

Megan joined Cornerstone as its Managing Director in January 2014. She led the company through a six-year grant initiative with the James Irvine Foundation’s New California Arts Fund as well as a 5-year Strategic Plan created in partnership with the DeVos Institute. Prior to moving to Los Angeles, Ms. Wanlass was the Executive Director of SITI Company (Anne Bogart, artistic director) for 19 years. At SITI, Megan helped to create over 35 productions touring to 88 cities, 32 states and 19 countries. She has an Arts Administration Certificate from New York University, attended the Executive Program for Non-Profit Leaders at Stanford University Business School and was a member of the Arts Leadership Institute Charter Class at Teachers College, Columbia University. Megan has served on the board of Theatre Communications Group and in 2006-2008 was a mentor through TCG’s New Generations Program. Wanlass participated on Cornerstone’s winning team for the UCLA Social Enterprise Academy (2017) and participated as a speaker at convenings/conferences and as a grant panelist for APAP, NFF, NET, EMCArts, ART/NY, DDCF, and TCG. Recent multi-part anti-racism training includes: Undoing Racism workshop led by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond and Building Individual Capacity to Co-Imagine, Co-Create, and Co-Foster an Anti-Racist, Multicultural Organizational Culture, Structure and Model workshop led by Diedra Barber. She holds a B.A. in Theater from Occidental College in Los Angeles.