Chris has been an instructor of acting at Case Western Reserve University since 2012. He works as an actor and director in the Cleveland area in both theater and film, and is an artistic associate with the Great Lakes Michael Chekhov Consortium. As a professor at CWRU, he has been nominated for The Bruce Jackson Award for Undergraduate Mentoring (2024) and the Carl F. Wittke Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2017). He earned the Cleveland Critics Circle award for Best Actor in a play in 2023 (Doubt) and 2017 (How to be A Respectable Junkie anPIC3d The Flick). He earned his MFA in performance from Wayne State University, where he had the opportunity to travel to Russia to study at the Moscow Art Theater School. He earned a BA in theater and economics from Lehigh University, and is a proud member of AEA and SAG-AFTRA. In 2024, Chris will play the roles of Mr. Bennet and Charlotte Lucas in the Cleveland Play House production of Pride and Prejudice, and will appear in two feature films: Unsinkable and Lost and Found in Cleveland.

Joan Ellison has been praised for her “vocal prowess... [and] organic grasp of the classic songs” by Michael Feinstein. As the restorer of Judy Garland’s orchestral arrangements for the Garland Heirs Trust, she brings musical authenticity and a life-long love for Judy to the stage.

Recent engagements include her solo concert Get Happy! A Judy Garland Celebration with symphonies coast-to-coast; a recreation of Garland’s Carnegie Hall concert hosted by Judy’s daughter, Lorna Luft, with Joan and Broadway divas Debbie Gravitte and Karen Mason; and touring with her cabaret show, Love Finds Judy Garland. Her newest symphonic concert, It’s Magic! Joan Ellison Swings in High Fidelity, celebrates the most dazzling singers, songwriters, and arrangers of the mid-twentieth century. Her work was recently featured as part of #PBSForTheArts and on Detroit Public Television.

She earned an M.M.T. and a B. Mus. in Voice from Oberlin Conservatory, and serves as Teacher of Popular Voice at The Cleveland Institute of Music. Ellison’s graduates have performed on and Off-Broadway, in London’s West End, in bands and national tours, in film and television, and can be heard on solo albums in many genres. joanellison.com

Eleanor Holdridge’s Off-Broadway productions include world premieres of Selma ’65 (LaMaMa), Steve & Idi (Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre), and Cycling Past The Matterhorn (Clurman Theatre). Regional world premieres include Ken Ludwig’s Lend Me A Soprano, David Grimm’s adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac, Lauren Gunderson’sThe Revolutionists (Cincinnati Playhouse), NNPN Rolling World Premieres of Lauren Gunderson’s Miss Bennett: Christmas at Pemberley and I and You, Meg Maroshnik’s Fickle: A Fancy French Farce, and Caleen Sinnette Jennings’ Queens Girl in the World (Theatre J). She has directed twenty-four of Shakespeare’s plays, some of them multiple times including her most recent Much Ado About Nothing at Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey and The Tempest for the CWRU/CPH MFA Acting Program. Upcoming projects include the Jane Eyre at the Alley Theatre, and Lend Me A Soprano at Olney Theatre. She holds an MFA from Yale School of Drama, and is a professor and Chairs the Drama Department at The Catholic University of America.

Steve Marvel is an actor, director, and educator whose 40-year career spans stage, film, television, and voiceover. He has appeared in numerous films, television shows, and plays, and his video game and audiobook narration work has been featured by major publishers throughout the US.

Steve’s Hollywood credits include roles opposite Michael Shannon in A Little White Lie, Harry Lennix and Robert Patrick in Troubled Watters, and a starring role in the cult favorite Chompy and the Girls. On the Los Angeles stage, Steve played Tom Sergeant in Skylight, (Chance Theater), Decius in Julius Caesar and Oronte in The School for Wives (A Noise Within), and was part of the original Geffen Playhouse company of The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord by Real Time with Bill Maher Executive Producer Scott Carter. His direction of the all-African American Macbeth featured The Black List’s Harry Lennix and Peter Macon of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.

Regionally, he has played roles at PCPA Theatrefest, The Aurora Theatre Company (Berkeley, California), Theatreworks Silicon Valley, the Sierra Repertory Theatre, the Arden Theatre Company and The Walnut Street Theater (Philadelphia), among others.

Locally, Steve has played the Emperor Joseph II in the Cleveland Playhouse’s acclaimed production of Amadeus, a host of roles in Ohio Shakespeare’s Nicholas Nickleby, the Professor in The Dobama Theatre’s Life Sucks, and a turn in Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders.

His audiobook narration work has earned him an Audiofile Earphones award, 4 Voice Arts Award nominations, and an IBPA Ben Franklin award, and he has voiced some 200 audiobooks for Penguin Random House, Macmillan Audio, Harper Audio, and others. He has voiced games for Sony, Mattel, and ActiVision, and he created the live-action version of PlayStation’s seminal Preacher in the Twisted Metal vehicle combat series.

Steve is a graduate in Acting from Northwestern University and in Theater Arts and Voice from The Interlochen Arts Academy. He previously lead a seminar in Voiceover for the Case Third Year graduate class, and he currently teaches voiceover and acting at 1st Team Actors Studio in North Olmsted. He is a member of SAG-AFTRA and Actors’ Equity Association.

Professor McGee is a member of Actors’ Equity and has been coaching voice and acting at Case Western Reserve University and directing productions for the department since 1988. She received her vocal training from internationally known voice specialist Arthur Lessac and his master teachers; she also trained in the Linklater voice technique at Shakespeare & Company and with Kristin Linklater. She has studied Shakespearean text, voice, movement and acting at Shakespeare & Company and with London's Royal National Theatre Studio. Professor McGee has also studied Fitzmaurice voice technique with Catherine Fitzmaurice and the "International Phonetic Alphabet Pillows Technique" with Linklater Master Teacher Louis Colaianni. Beth was the on-site dialect coach for the Cinemax television series, Quarry. She regularly voice and dialect coaches Cleveland area productions, and productions with the CWRU/CPH MFA Acting Program and CWRU’s MPAC Theaters. In 2007, she earned a certificate for participating in over 300 hours of workshops at the Roy Hart Theater Centre Internationale in Maléragues, France where she has also taught workshops with Roy Hart Master Teachers Ivan Midderigh and Marie Paule Marthe. You can find her 1981 Folkways album of folksongs “Love is Teasing” permanently housed in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Midderigh and Marie Paule Marthe.

Eliza Ladd Schwarz is a performer, director, stage writer, song maker, and movement designer from NYC. She is thrilled to be in her second year on the faculty at CWRU / Cleveland Playhouse MFA after 10 years teaching at the FSU / Asolo Conservatory. Previously Eliza taught at Marymount Manhattan College, Kingsborough Community College, the Terry Schreiber Acting Conservatory, Naropa University, and at Shakespeare and Company.

Currently, through the Glennan Fellowship at CWRU, Eliza is developing a new course, Live Sound Action: Learning at the Crossroads of Performance and Design, an articulation of her performance research, known as Live Sound Action, which integrates physical and musical storytelling with sound design technologies to capture and amplify the work. Also, Eliza is initiating a new devised piece titled COBALT - a digging into the world surrounding the precious natural resource. Last year in the MFA she contributed Original Ensemble Choreography to Middletown and collaborated as Movement Coach on the Tempest. This year she will be directing Men On Boats and teaching Movement and Devising Original Theater at the undergraduate level as well as teaching MFA Movement and collaborating on the season.

In NYC, Eliza has created original multi-disciplinary work at PS 122, Dixon Place, Movement Research, the Knitting Factory, and Joyce Soho, and performed at La Mama, the Kitchen, NY Theater Workshop, and St. Ann’s Warehouse, as well as with Shakespeare and Company in MA.

Eliza won the Audience Encore Award for her ensemble musical Elephants and Gold, produced at the Boulder Fringe and the Berkshire Fringe, and wrote and performed On Est Déshabillé, a comedy about death at the United Solo Theatre Festival and The Berkshire Fringe. Eliza is the recipient of a Franklin Furnace Emerging Artist Award for her original performance work, a Puffin Foundation Grant in support of her Live Sound Action theater training, and an Andrew W Mellon Foundation Grant for “Devised Theater and Collaboration for Social Engagement.”

In Sarasota FL she created and performed Selfie of the Ancients and Tigers Above and Tigers Below at New Music New College, O Let Me Just Be the Greek Whore that I Am at the Sarasolo Festival, Dali +Picasso at the Dali Museum (in Collaboration with Sarasota Contemporary Dance), and the solo works Autobiography of the Human Species and Gravity and Levity at Sarasota Contemporary Dance. Notable recent works include Work /Play /Work, a theatrical ensemble zoom response to the 2020 call for social justice, and Agridulce/Bittersweet, a bilingual community collaboration.

In addition to extensive training in Clown, Improvisation, Primitive Voice, Developmental Movement, and Shakespeare, and as a percussionist, singer and actor, Eliza is a Licensed Ashaya™ Yoga teacher, as well as a certified Body Dynamics™ educator of Movement for the Actor. She holds a BA in Comparative Religion from Harvard University and an MFA in Theater: Contemporary Performance from Naropa University.

elizaladd.com

Professor Scott is a director, actor, and speech consultant who has served on the CWRU faculty since 2000. He was appointed chair of the Department of Theater in 2015 and served until 2023. In 2017 he was appointed the Katharine Bakeless Nason Professor in Theater and Drama. Jerrold teaches speech, dialects, and classical acting technique in the MFA program, and directs in the ensemble productions. Local directing credits include Hay Fever, She Stoops to Conquer, The Philadelphia Story, Present Laughter, Heartbreak House, and The Real Thing in the MFA acting program; Arcadia, The Rocky Horror Show, Urinetown, and The Glass Menagerie at the CWRU Department of Theater; and Polish Joke, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and A Doll’s House at the Beck Center for the Arts. He also works as a speech, text and dialect coach, and served as the resident dialect coach at Cleveland Play House for over a decade, and has also coached at Great Lakes Theatre Festival and Dobama Theatre.

David made his feature film debut opposite Tom Hanks in Steven Spielberg’s SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. His television credits include guest appearances on GREY’S ANATOMY, DEXTER, HOUSE, MANHUNT and THE MAYOR OF KINGSTOWN. Recent film roles include Netflix’s SHIRLEY (opposite Academy Award winner Regina King), ALTO KNIGHTS (opposite Robert DeNiro) and the LeBron James biopic SHOOTING STARS for Peacock.

He has worked with a number of other Oscar, Golden Globe, and Emmy Award-winning actors including Taraji P. Henson, Jon Hamm, Helen Hunt and Martin Landau. He is a member of SAG-AFTRA and Actors Equity Association (AEA).

His stage credits include South Coast Repertory, Chautauqua Theatre Company, None Too Fragile, and Dobama. He recently appeared in A Doll’s House Pt.2 at the Beck Center and Rajiv Joseph's Describe the Night for Ensemble Theatre. David has an MFA in Acting and Directing from California State University, Long Beach, and an undergraduate degree from the University of Evansville.

Kenya Woods, a native of Cleveland, Ohio, holds more than 30 years of experience in dance performance, choreography, teaching, and leadership. She holds a degree in Dance from Tennessee State University and is certified in Lester Horton Pedagogy, the official technique taught at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center. Her additional dance credits include Dance New Amsterdam and North Coast Ballet Theater. Madame Darvash, Dr. Diane McIntyre and Lynn Simonson have influenced her teaching style as well.

She has worked nationally and internationally at regional dance companies, universities and school systems as an educator, performer, and choreographer. In Spring 2022, Ms. Woods was a Hildegarde and Elbert Baker Visiting Scholar in the Humanities Department at Case Western Reserve University.

She continues to teach dance to students of all ages and lead programs that help cultivate technique, artistry, body awareness and empowerment and appreciation for dance.