Each year, Playwright’s Foundation invites special guests to participate in the festival. Each of the readings will be followed by a conversation between the content expert, the playwright, and the dramaturg about the play and it’s content. These content experts represent the connection of our plays to the greater world while enriching the conversation around these plays with an extraordinary level of expertise.
2019 Content Experts
Carmen Cheung is a lawyer based in San Francisco, California. She has acted as counsel in public interest cases in the U.S. and Canada, including litigation over the use of torture and extraordinary rendition by the U.S. government, and an inquiry into the transfer of Afghan detainees by Canadian Forces to risk of torture. Carmen has made submissions at all levels of federal court in the U.S., including the Supreme Court of the United States, and has also appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada. In addition, she has testified on matters relating to security, anti-terrorism and human rights before committees of the Canadian Parliament and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Prior to joining CJA, Carmen was a Professor of Global Practice at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, where she also served as Executive Director of the Global Justice Lab and Associate Director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace, Conflict, and Justice. Her teaching and research focused on security and human rights, and state responses to threats to public safety and security.
Linda Jones is a Birth and Postpartum Doula and mother of two who lives in Oakland, CA. She founded and owned Waddle and Swaddle Baby Boutique and Resource Center in Berkeley, CA and has been a part of the natural birth advocacy community in the Bay Area for over two decades. She belongs to Sistahs of the Good Birth, a group of Black Doulas who work with low income mothers. She was one of the founders of a volunteer Doula group that provided services for low income, uninsured and teen moms that birthed at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley.
Russell Blackwood produced and directed his first Grand Guignol horror play, THE LABORATORY OF HALLUCINATIONS, right here in San Francisco in 1991. That led to the founding of Thrillpeddlers which debuted with the American premiere of Clive Barker’s FRANKENSTEIN IN LOVE. From 1999 through 2016, the company presented SHOCKTOBERFEST, their annual Grand Guignol spectacular. Their research web site, grandguignol.com, is the most complete source of information about the infamous French horror theatre on the net. The Hypnodrome, Thrillpeddlers’ SOMA venue, opened in 2004 and for thirteen years led a Grand Guignol and Theatre of the Ridiculous revival until the building was sold and the company closed its doors. Russell’s productions have also played throughout the U.S. from New York to Alaska, as well as England, Taiwan, Brazil and South Africa. He earned his BFA in Acting from Boston University.
Rhodessa Jones is Co-Artistic Director of the acclaimed San Francisco performance company Cultural Odyssey. She is an actress, teacher, director, and writer. Ms. Jones is also the Founder and Director of the award-winning Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women/HIV Circle, which is a performance workshop designed to achieve personal and social transformation with incarcerated women and women living with HIV. Ms. Jones has been a Visiting Professor at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California (2015), and an Interdisciplinary Artist in Residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2014), as well as the Keynote Speaker for Commencement at the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Additionally, Ms. Jones was awarded the 2015 Theatre Practitioner Award by Theater Communications Group, which recognizes “a living individual whose work in the American theatre has evidenced exemplary achievement over time and who has contributed significantly to the development of the larger field.” Ms. Jones is also the recipient of a United States Artist Fellowship to support her work, and has been honored with an Honorary Doctorate from California College of the Arts.
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Lulu Matute is a multidisciplinary artist and activist-scholar grounded in Liberation Theology, Ancestral Curanderismo (healing w[e]rk), and the making of social memory. She designs collaborative spaces, experiences, and multimedia art projects that deal with Central American diaspora, memory and migration, environmentalism, and freedom from incarceration.
Juan Berumen is long time teatrista who believes in the power of theater to transform the self and society. He has acted, written and directed several plays throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. Juan is also a strong advocate for equity in the arts and using every opportunity as a platform to create space wherever possible for artists and audiences of Color. Currently, he is a member of Campo Santo, an award-winning woke theater company dedicated to developing new performances and cultivating new audiences, centering on people of color and others historically overlooked in theater. Juan is also actively involved with Bindlestiff Studios, a community-based performance theater for emerging Filipino-American and Filipino artists. B/Q
Catherine Tactaquin is Executive Director of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR), a nationwide alliance that advocates for the human rights of all migrants,regardless of migration status. The daughter of an immigrant farmworker from the Philippines, Catherine was involved for many years in grassroots organizing and advocacy in the Filipino community, and in 1986, was a co-founder of the National Network. She is also a member and co-founder of the Global Coalition on Migration and the Women in Migration Network, both of which coalesce organizations and activists from the global regions towards international migrants’ rights advocacy. She frequently speaks on a wide range of current U.S. immigration issues and global migration policies, including migration concerns at the intersection of race, climate change and the environment, and gender.
Lulu Matute is a multidisciplinary artist and activist-scholar grounded in Liberation Theology, Ancestral Curanderismo (healing w[e]rk), and the making of social memory. She designs collaborative spaces, experiences, and multimedia art projects that deal with Central American diaspora, memory and migration, environmentalism, and freedom from incarceration.
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See bio above
Mahjabeen Dhala is a presidential scholar in the department of Sacred Texts and their Interpretations at the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley. Her doctoral research is primarily within theology and women’s studies. Her dissertation looks at the seventh-century Sermon of Fatima to trace early Islamic activist voices, especially those of women. Her work focuses on retrieving narratives of women within Islamic exegetical, spiritual, and wisdom literature to argue for empowerment from within the tradition. In her capacity as a motivational speaker and a spiritual guide, she has traveled widely, thus gaining a unique insight into the concerns of Muslim women both in the global North and the South.
Christine Hosada has been a physical education teacher in the San Francisco unified school district for twelve years. She has coached girls basketball in the academic athletic association (public schools in San Francisco) for eleven years and badminton for twelve years. Christine’s first experience coaching girls basketball was with an Asian league where she coached middle school to high school aged girls for about 3 years.
Special Events
Seeking Home: Migration and Displacement in the age of Climate Change: Thought leaders in the subjects of theatre,performance, forced expulsion, global migration policies and how they intersect with race, climate change, and gender. What is it to lose home and have to create a new one under considerable cultural and material duress? Panelists include: Catherine Tactaquin, Lulu Matute, and Juan Berumen.
A Presentation on Grand Guignol by Russell Blackwood: Step into the raunchy and fabulous world of Grand Guignol with San Francisco’s resident expert, Russell Blackwood! Join the Thrillpeddlers founder for an afternoon of gore, gags, drama, and history.
Producing from the Margins: Best Practices for Inclusive Programming: This panel is robing into the responsibility of a producer when they produce work from communities are not their own or marketing such work to other communities. Are we creating empathy or facilitating an objectifying gaze? How do we support people in telling their own stories?