Theatre director and writer JoAnne Akalaitis is the winner of five Obie Awards for direction (and sustained achievement) and founder of the critically acclaimed Mabou Mines in New York. She has staged works by Euripides, Shakespeare, Strindberg, Schiller, Beckett, Genet, Williams, Philip Glass, Janacek, and her own work at Lincoln Center Theatre, New York City Opera, Goodman Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, American Repertory Theatre, Court Theatre, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and The Guthrie Theater. She is the former artistic director of the New York Shakespeare Festival and was artist in residence at the Court Theatre. Ms. Akalaitis was the Andrew Mellon Co-chair of the Directing Program at Juilliard School, and is currently the Wallace Benjamin Flint and L. May Hawver Flint Professor of Theater at Bard College. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants, Edwin Booth Award, Rosamund Gilder Award for Outstanding Achievement in Theatre, and Pew Charitable Trusts National Theatre Artist Residency Program grant.

Oskar Eustis is the Artistic Director of The Public Theater and has worked as a director, dramaturg, and artistic director for theaters around the country. From 1981 through 1986 he was resident director and dramaturg at the Eureka Theatre Company in San Francisco, and Artistic Director until 1989, when he moved to the L.A.'s Mark Taper Forum as Associate Artistic Director until 1994. Mr. Eustis then served as Artistic Director at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island for eleven years. In 2005 he took the helm at New York's Public Theater. Throughout his career, Mr. Eustis has been dedicated to the development of new plays as both a director and a producer. At The Public he directed the New York premiere of Rinne Groff's The Ruby Sunrise. At Trinity Rep, he directed the world premiere of Paula Vogel's The Long Christmas Ride Home (Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Production); Homebody/Kabul (Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Production); the world premiere of Rinne Groff's The Ruby Sunrise; Angels in America, Part I: Millennium Approaches (Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Director); Angels in America, Part II: Perestroika; as well as world premieres of plays by Philip Kan Gotanda, David Henry Hwang, Emily Mann, Suzan-Lori Parks, Ellen McLaughlin, and Eduardo Machado. He commissioned Tony Kushner's Angels in America at the Eureka Theatre Company in San Francisco and directed its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum. He was a professor of Theatre, Speech and Dance at Brown University, where he founded and chaired the Trinity Rep/Brown University Consortium for professional theater training. He received an honorary doctorate from Brown in 2001 and currently serves as Professor of Dramatic Writing and Arts and Public Policy at New York University.

Jim Leverett began his career as an actor on Broadway and beyond. He was the first director of Literary Services at Theatre Communications Group, where he helped to initiate many publications, including American Theatre magazine. In 1988, he received the first Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas award for services to the field. He wrote introductions to Harvey Fierstein's Torchsong Trilogy and Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia, along with numerous pieces in other national and international publications, including Yale's Theater for which he is a contributing editor. He has worked as dramaturg throughout the United States, most recently Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession at Berkshire Theatre Festival. He is Associate Professor of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the Yale School of Drama and visiting professor in the Theater Division of Columbia University's School of the Arts.

Jennifer Tipton is well known for her work in theater, dance and opera. Ms. Tipton teaches lighting at the Yale School of Drama. She has received in recent years the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, the Jerome Robbins Prize and the Mayor's Award for Arts and Culture in New York City.

As artistic director of advanced beginner group, David Neumann's work has been presented in New York at PS 122, Dance Theater Workshop, Central Park SummerStage (where he collaborated with John Giorno), Celebrate Brooklyn, Symphony Space (where he collaborated with Laurie Anderson), La Mama ETC, the Downtown Art Co., and Mabou Mines. He recently premiered feedforward, a multi-disciplinary dance-based work with a two-week run at Dance Theater Workshop. He has been a featured dancer in the works of Susan Marshall, Jane Comfort, Sally Silvers, Irene Hultman, Cathy Weiss, Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar's Big Dance Theater, and club legend Willi Ninja. He was a member of Doug Varone and Dancers, and an eight-year original member and collaborator with the Doug Elkins Dance Company, with whom he toured nationally and internationally. He has choreographed for the theater for many such groups as Gale Gates et al, Mabou Mines, En Garde Arts, the Builders Association, Workhouse Theater, and the Archa Theater in Prague; working with such directors as: Hal Hartley, Laurie Anderson, Daniel Aukin, Robert Woodruff, Lee Breuer, Peter Sellars, JoAnn Akalaitis, Chris Bayes, Mark Wing-Davey, and Les Waters in venues including Mabou Mines, the Public Theater, Signature Theatre, Soho Rep, La Mama ETC, Hartford Stage, Sundance, St. Ann's Warehouse, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Kennedy Center, and the Salzburg Festival in Austria.

Nicholas Rudall is Professor Emeritus of Classical Languages and Literatures, the Committee on General Studies in the Humanities, the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World, and the College at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1966. He specializes in Greek drama, and has translated numerous works by Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, most recently Euripides' The Bacchae and The Iphigeneia Plays, and Sophocles' Electra and Antigone. A translation of The Trojan Women is forthcoming. Rudall is also co-editor with Bernard Sahlins of the Plays for Performance series, and has co-taught a course in "The History and Theory of Drama" with prominent Shakespearean and fellow University of Chicago Professor David Bevington. He is the founding director of the Court Theatre in Chicago, and has won multiple Joseph Jefferson Awards for his work as an actor and translator.

Sara Jobin has conducted performances of Tosca, Der fliegende Holländer, Norma, and most recently the world premiere of Philip Glass' Appomattox on the San Francisco Opera mainstage, and has led productions for the San Francisco Opera Center including Conrad Susa's Transformations, The Bear, Dr. Heidegger's Fountain of Youth, and Egon und Emilie. Recent credits elsewhere include a live recording of John Musto's Volpone at Wolf Trap Opera, Carmen and La Bohème at Tacoma Opera, Macbeth at West Bay Opera, Chrysalis at Berkeley Opera, performances of Der fliegende Holländer at Arizona Opera, and The Seven Deadly Sins at the Crucible School for Fire Arts in Oakland. Upcoming engagements include Il Barbiere di Siviglia in Tacoma, concerts with Symphony Silicon Valley and the Dayton Philharmonic, and The Little Prince with San Francisco Opera. Previously she conducted for four years at Opera San Jose and was the Founding Music Director of the Tassajara Symphony, with whom she recorded the premiere of River of Song by Chris Brubeck with Frederica von Stade on the Koch label. She attended Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges as a Leonard Bernstein Music Scholar, and studied conducting under Charles Bruck at the Pierre Monteux School. Special recognition includes a recent grant from The Solti Foundation.