Genevieve Chase
Chase is a Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Army Reserve. From February 2005 to October of 2007, Chase volunteered for active duty service to serve with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry) in Fort Drum, New York and Afghanistan. Since returning from active duty service, Chase has worked to bring to light the issues faced by today's veterans. While advocating on their behalf, she discovered a need for a focus on women veterans and their families from all eras and branches of service. From that void, Chase created American Women Veterans and began, in earnest, the 21st century women veterans movement. Chase currently resides in Alexandria, Virginia.
Stratos Constantinidis
Dr. Constantinidis is author of Theatre under Deconstruction (Garland Publishing) and Modern Greek Theatre in a Quest for Hellenism (McFarland Publishers). He has translated into English AeschylusPersians, Kalliroi Siganou-Parren’s The New Woman (Oxford University Press), and Iakovos Kambanellis’ A Tale without a Title (Elikia Books). He is credited for having taught the first course on Modern Greek drama in the United States.
Heather Courtney
Courtney is an award-winning documentary filmmaker based in Austin, Texas and Washington, D.C. Her film Where Soldiers Come From, about young men enlisting in the National Guard and being deployed to Iraq, has been nominated for a 2012 News & Documentary Emmy Award for outstanding coverage of a news story.
Joseph Fahey
Dr. Fahey is an Associate Professor of Theatre at the Ohio State University Mansfield campus. He is a former editor of the journal Theatre Studies and has also published reviews of contemporary performance and texts. His areas of research have included the Theatre of the Cold War, Television Drama, movement training for the modern actor, and the use of psychological models in efforts to enhance character development.
Maria Faini
Faini is a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnic Studies and Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. Her work focuses on U.S. imperial culture and art practice as radical sociality. Publications include pieces in Locating Life Stories: Beyond East-West Binaries in (Auto)Biographical Studies and Ada: A Journal of Gender, Technology, and New Media. She is co-executive editor of nineteen sixty nine: an ethnic studies journal and co-founder of IABA’s Life Writing SNS Network.
Lesley Ferris
Dr. Ferris is an Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of Theatre at The Ohio State University, just published “Re-Dressing Women’s History in the Special Operations Executive:The Camouflage Project (co-authored with Mary Tarantino) in Working Memory: Women and Work in World War II (M. Kadar and J Perreault, eds., 2015).
Dominic Fredianelli
Fredianelli served as a driver and gunner with the Michigan National Guard in Afghanistan in 2009, where he and his fellow soldiers looked for roadside bombs. In fall of 2010, he completed a 70-foot outdoor mural that was highlighted in a special exhibit at Finlandia University in his hometown of Hancock, Michigan. Dominic Fredianelli is the subject of the documentary "Where Soldiers Come From." "Where Soldiers Come From" follows Fredianelli and his best friend as they join the National Guard after high school, serve in Afghanistan, and return home to Michigan's Upper Pensinula as veterans at age 23.
Chris Gelpi
Christopher F. Gelpi (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1994) is Chair of Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution at the Mershon Center for International Security and Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University. His primary research interests are the sources of international militarized conflict and strategies for international conflict resolution. He is currently engaged in research on American public opinion and the use of military force, and on statistical models for forecasting military conflict and transnational terrorist violence.
Andisheh Ghaderi
Ghaderi is a PhD candidate in French Language and Literature at Michigan State University. She is also a teaching assistant of French at MSU’s College of Arts and Letters. She received her BA in French Literature, and an MA in French Studies from the University of Tehran (Iran).
Anoosheh Ghaderi
Ghaderi is a PhD candidate in French Language and Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is also a teaching assistant of French at Illinois’s Department of French and Italian. She received her BA in French Translation in Allameh-Tabatabaei University, and an MA in French Studies from the University of Tehran (Iran).
Chrisanne Gordon
Dr. Gordon graduated summa cum laude from The Ohio State University College of Medicine, and is board certified by the American Board of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. Her special interest is with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) since she has experienced TBI recovery both as a physician and as a patient.
Elaine Handley
Dr. Handley is Professor of Writing and Literature at SUNY Empire State College. She has published poetry and fiction in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Handley’s most recent chapbook of poetry is Letters to My Migraine Currently, she is completing a Civil War novel and collaborating with painter Marco Montanari.
Erika Hughes
Dr. Hughes is an assistant professor in the School of Film, Dance and Theatre at Arizona State University. She has held fellowships at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USA), the Freie Universität Berlin (Germany), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), Kinnaird College (Pakistan) and the Universität Bonn (Germany), among others. Her articles and reviews have been published in Performance Research, Youth Theatre Journal, the Journal of European Studies, the Brecht Yearbook, and Theatre Journal, as well as a number of edited volumes. As a director, her work has been seen on stages in the United States, Germany, Israel, and Pakistan.
John E. Logan, Jr.
Logan is currently a Financial Analyst for the ADAMH Board of Franklin County, and the Veterans representative of the Ohio State Suicide Prevention Foundation. In 1968, John served in the Air Force as a Vietnam combat medic, Cam Ran Bay, Vietnam. Afterwards, stationed at RAF Lakenheath Air Force Base England, where he worked as a Surgeon’s assistant for various Military Hospitals throughout Europe, and was a member of the ATH Unit (Air Transportable Hospital).
Paco José Madden
Madden is an activist writer/scholar and currently a graduate student at Arizona State University’s Dramatic Writing program (expected graduation 2017). He received his bachelor’s degree in Drama from Catholic University of America. He presented his paper The Rise of Geek, not Greek, Theatre at Stage the Future 2.
Kevin McClatchy
McClatchy currently oversees the acting curriculum in the Department of Theatre at the Ohio State University. As an actor, Kevin most recently played Prospero in an adaptation of The Tempest at the Royal Shakespeare Company, directed by Kelly Hunter. This production involving children with autism was part of the Shakespeare and Autism project, which Kevin has been a core member of since 2012. Selected theatre credits include Red, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, Stones in His Pockets, The Blowin of Baile Gall and Almost, Maine. Film credits include Love and Other Drugs, Unstoppable and The Lodge. On television, Kevin spent two years on Another World and had recurring roles on Guiding Light, One Life to Live and General Hospital. Primetime credits include NCIS, ER, X-Files, That 70s Show and The Practice as well as the television movie The Pennsylvania Miners Story and the miniseries The War That Made America. He can be seen this January in the new WGN series Outsiders. Kevin received his MFA from The Ohio State University and is a member of Actors' Equity Association, SAG/AFTRA and the Voice and Speech Trainer Association.
Marco Montanari
Montanari is an independent artist residing in Boulder, Colorado, working exclusively in encaustic painting. He originally developed a process of sculpting wax on a wood lathe and painting the sculpted surfaces with paraffin to make luminaries. He translated these techniques into encaustic painting on canvas board. Currently, he collaborates with poet Elaine Handley in the ekphrastic tradition.
Janet Parrott
Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies, The Ohio State University
Janet Parrott is a former dancer/performer who has translated her interest in movement, cultures and storytelling into films. As a dancer/performer she has performed at Jacobs Pillow, St. Marks Place, DTW, and The Dance Place just to name a few. She is an independent filmmaker who has directed and produced commercial and industrial work, produced her own films and has collaborated with independent artists creating works for stage and screen. Her films have been screened the Three Rivers Arts Festival, The Black Maria Film Festival, with the Chicago Women Filmmakers and at The Wexner Center for The Arts. Her documentary Song of the Soul: Stories of Hospice in South Africa documents the lives of hospice nurses and caregivers who serve their communities demonstrating the effective practice of hospice and palliative care as an exemplar of community-based compassionate care. http://icarusfilms.com/fanlight/ofsou.html. Janet is the recipient of an OSU Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching and was named the ASC Student Council Outstanding Teaching Award finalist.
Max Rayneard
Dr. Rayneard is the Senior Writer / Producer for The Telling Projects. He is the co-developer of the Telling Project process, and has written and / or directed 15 Telling Project productions. He is a South African Fulbright scholar with a Doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon.
Simona Rybáková
Dr. Rybáková studied at the College of Applied Art and Design, and then pursued her schooling at Studio of Textile Design of the Academy of Art and Design in Prague. In 1990, she spent six months as a visiting graduate student of textile design at the University of Industrial Arts in Helsinki, Finland. In 1995, she won the Swarowski Award (graduate study at the Rhode Island School of Design at Providence, R. I., USA). Between 1997 and 2009, she was the Czech Republic’s representative on the executive board of the International Organization of Scenographers, Theatre Artists and Technicians (OISTAT), and since 1997 she has been a member of the same organization’s commission on stage design. In 2007, she became a member of the European Film Academy. At the Prague Quadrennial 2011, she curated the international exhibition Extreme Costume. Apart from costume design and individual textile design, she has been involved in the media of designer textile prints and carpets, jewelry, sculpture, and drawing.
Bianca Sams
Sams is an Actor/Writer/Producer hailing from the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School, where she earned the distinction of being Tisch’s first ever Triple Major (Acting, Dramatic Writing, Africana Studies). At NYU she studied acting through the Strasberg Film Institute and Royal Academy Dramatic Arts (RADA) London, England. Her work has been seen at Karamu House, Cleveland Public Theater, Old Vic Theater London and Public Theater in New York. She has performed as an actor at Cleveland Public Theater, Florida Studio Theater, Old Vic London, Public Theater NY, and can be seen on film in RENT directed by Chris Columbus. She is a full member of the Old Vic New Voices Network New York under Artistic Director Kevin Spacey. She has produced several ten-minute play festivals in New York and Los Angeles, and is moving into full length off-Broadway theater. She received an MFA in playwriting from Ohio University with Charles Smith and Erik Ramsey.
Jonathan Shay
For 20 years Jonathan Shay was a staff psychiatrist at the Department of Veterans Affairs Outpatient Clinic, Boston, where his only patients were combat veterans with severe psychological injuries. He retired from clinical work in May 2008 to devote himself full time to preventive psychiatry in military organizations—what he calls his “missionary work.” While he has written and lectured on matters that have interested academics, he has not held a conventional faculty position anywhere for decades. Sporadically, he has held positions within US military institutions, such as Visiting Scholar-at-Large at the US Naval War College (2001), performed the Commandant of the Marine Corps Trust Study (1999-2000), served as Chair of Ethics, Leadership, and Personnel Policy in the Office of the US Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel (2004- 2005), and spring semester 2009, was the Omar Bradley Chair of Strategic Leadership at the US Army War College jointly with Dickinson College. He has been a MacArthur Fellow since the January, 2008. He is the author of Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (1994) and of Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (2002). The latter has a Foreword authored jointly by US Senators John McCain and Max Cleland. He is currently attempting to “wrestle to the ground” a multi-volume work titled, Trust within Fighting Forces: Its Significance, Its Creation, Maintenance, and Destruction. He has contributed to understanding the role of theater in the democratic polity of classical Athens, where every citizen was ipso facto a soldier or sailor, and the polity itself constantly at war. He is planning expansion of this theme into a book, once the wrestling match is over. Dr. Shay has delivered a number of high profile named lectures in Classics over the years, for example, The Eitner Lecture in Classics at Stanford University. The title was “Agamemnon, Achilles, Odysseus: Homer on Military Leadership.” Dr. Shay is Class of 1963 at Harvard College, has an “ABD” [wry smile] in sociology from the GSAS at Columbia, and an MD-PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.
Katherine Skoretz
Skoretz is a PhD candidate in Theatre at Wayne State University. Her dissertation study is on post-9/11 theatrical exploration of re-integration and home through analysis and performance of contemporary plays. She co-founded the Underground Theatre at the Studio and directed Oohrah! and Three Sisters for its inaugural summer season. She is a member of ArtLabJ Movement Theatre and just closed a critically acclaimed all female production of Hamlet with Slipstream Theatre Initiative where she played Horatia.
James L. Smith
Smith is a doctoral candidate at California Institute of Integral Studies. As a founding member of Montana Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing (PHWFF), Smith has a history of working with veterans and is deeply familiar with their issues. He has also trained members of the Montana National Guard and a cohort of mental health providers on issues confronting returning veterans and has trained volunteers, program leads and regional coordinators for PHWFF in Montana, Pennsylvania and New York.
Nancy Smith-Watson
Watson is a trauma informed Somatic Body worker, professional actress and Founder and Director of Feast of Crispian. She has trained at Circle-In-The-Square’s professional acting training program in NYC and as a somatic therapist in integrative somatics in Boulder, CO and Austin, TX
James Tasse
Tasse is an actor, director, Senior Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Co-Founder of Feast of Crispian and a Vietnam Era Veteran. He trained with UW-M’s Professional Theatre Training Program and has performed with many Milwaukee theatre companies. He also served as Associate Artistic Director for Milwaukee Chamber Theatre.
Abderazak Tebbeb
Dr. Tebbeb is an assistant professor at the University of Monastir, Tunisia. He holds a Ph.D in English literature from the University of Sousse, Tunisia. His research interests include literature, literary criticism, discourse analysis, literary pragmatics, cognitive poetics, and humor research. He coined the collocation “syncretic humor” and is currently working on pictorial syncretic humor in the graphic novel.
Bill Watson
Watson is an Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, professional actor, director and Co-Founder of Feast of Crispian. Trained at the University of Washington he has acted in such theatres as the Colorado Shakespeare Company, The Seattle Repertory Theatre, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre among many others.
Julia Watson
Watson is Professor Emerita of Comparative Studies and former Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University. She and Sidonie Smith have co-authored Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (second, extended edition, 2010) and co-edited five collections and several essays on autobiography. Watson has recently published essays exploring graphic memoir, posthumanism, and voice, and, with Smith, testimony and online life narrative.