Beth Donohue Templeton

...Director of in-house Education Programs at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, is a 12 year veteran of the Bay area stage. Beth is a core member of Berkeley's award winning Shotgun Players and has also worked with the Berkeley Rep, Aurora Theatre, Magic Theatre and others. Beth is the curriculum director of the Kaleidoscope Rainbow camp program as well as a teaching artist for special needs classrooms for the L incoln Center Institute for Arts in Education through the JMCA. Beth has also been on the faculty of the Berkeley Rep, Kaleidoscope Unlimited, and the Integrated Arts program of All Souls Church.

Reid Davis

Reid is a Ph.D. candidate in the Dramatic Art and film studies departments at Berkeley. He has directed in the ACT Advanced Training Program, Cal shakes, Eureka Theatre, theatre Rhinoceros, Signal Theatre, and Kudzu Theatre. He is a company member of Berkeley's Shotgun Players, where he has directed and acted in numerous shows, most recently in this summer's Troilus and Cressida. Reid was the winner of 1994 Dramalogue awards for production and direction of Burn This. He has taught and directed at Actors' Theatre of Louisville, assisted Athol Fugard in his American premiere of My children! My Aftrica! in New York, and written plays and essays that have been produced in New York and published in Theatre Week and Film Quarterly. He has taught at ACT, Cal Shakes, UC Berkeley, Los Medanos College, and Solano College.

Lu Yi

Mr. Lu Yi brings more than 50 years experience to the Kaleidoscope program - as a performer, master trainer and artistic director. For 33 years he was associated with the world famous Nanjing Acrobatic Troupe, first as a star performer and later as president and artistic director. Mr. Lu Yi has judged international circus competitions in Paris, Monte Carlo and Nanjing. Directing and training credits include 3 years in Australia with Circus OZ, New York's Big Apple Circus and the San Francisco Circus Center. Mr. Lu Yi is now the Artistic Director for the New Pickle Circus.

Hector Armienta

...has been an arts educator and curriculum specialist for over 12 years. He has worked with organizations such as the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, Music Center Education Division, San Francisco opera, Young audiences of the Bay area, Kollage Community School for the Arts, Music in Schools Today, the San Francisco Education Foundation and others. some of the types of artist in residencies he has conducted include, "Learning Music Through Movement," "Creating Your Own Opera," "Native American Legends and Music," and more. In addition to his work as an arts educator, he has garnered several awards and commissions as a composer. Most recently, his chamber opera, "River of Women" was produced at Theater Artaud in 2001.

Michael Cheng
Michael Cheng has performed for several bay area theater groups, including The Shotgun Players, Campo Santo, Word for Word, Subterranean Shakespeare, Theater Artaud, as well as understudying for Berkeley Rep. He worked with the Z Space Studio to develop their Singabout! Musical Theater Camp, where he served as a coordinator, acting and improv instructor, as well as guest artist. He has also worked with incarcerated Asian youths at the Richmond Youth Project in the development of a play they wrote and performed in festivals and venues in the East Bay. He started an Asian American Theater Company at UC Berkeley, and has guest lectured in the drama department on Noh and Japanese Theater. A popular JMCA/Kaleidoscope teacher, Michael last joined us to teach acting for our 2002 Summer Performing Arts Camps.

David Stephen Maier
...is an actor, director and fight choreograher who has been working with young people for the past twelve years. He was a member of the faculty at The Seattle Children's Theatre, The Youth Theatre Northwest, and was an artist-in-residence in the Seattle Public Schools. In addition to Kaleidoscope, he is a member of the faculty at ACT's Young Conservatory and is teaching and directing in Berkeley and Contra Costa County public schools.

Dylan Russell

...is a professional director/actor/playwright who has worked in the Bay Area for over ten years. She is a Founder of Hannah Productions, and has also worked with Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Sierra Repertory Theatre,California Conservatory Theatre, and the Eureka Theatre Company. Dylan has taught at Actors Lab AZ, Northwestern University's National High School Institute, Marin Theatre Company and New Conservatory Theatre Center. Her training includes a B.A. in Drama from the University of Washington as well as courses at Vassar College and A.C.T.

Elizabeth McKoy

...is Director of Education at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts after four years on faculty at the Seattle Children's Theatre. A professional singer, actor and teacher for over 16 years, she has performed in New York, San Francisco and Seattrle theaters. She created and directed educational theater programs in Harlem, NY and San Francisco. She has been an artist-in-residence in many public and private schools, and she has most recently started developing and implementing teacher training programs in the arts with the Lincoln Center Institute.

Rona Siddiqui

...(Music Director/ Stage Door Conservatory) received her bachelors degree in Music Composition from UCLA. She has been with Stage Door Conservatory since summer 2000, working with both the On Broadway program for 5th-9th graders, and Kids OnStage for 3rd-5th graders. She has received numerous awards for piano performance and composition, including international recognition for her piece, Storms and Whispers, from the National Association of Women in Music. Recently she has been teaching piano, music directing, and accompanying musicals in the Bay Area.

Kimberly Wilday

...has taught and performed in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York. She divides her time between acting, teaching, grant writing & special event planning. a graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, she studied Viewpoints, Suzuki, Grotowski, Meisner, and more. She has also trained at American Musical Theater, Dance Arts Center with Berle Davis and voice with Jeff Halpern in New York City.

Brian Herndon

...is an actor and certified stage combat instructor. He has performed with TheatreWorks, Pacific Stage Alliance, California Shakespeare Festival and Center Repertory Theatre. An instructor in stage combat, acting and physical comedy, he has taught at the Academy of the Sword, Portola Valley Theatre Conservatory and Odyssey Middle School among others. He received his M.F.A. in acting from the Alabama Shakespeare Festival.

Patrick Dooley

...is the artistic director and founder of the Shotgun Players. He received a BA in English from James Madison University of Virginia and is a founding member of the international touring company, the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express. Patrick also spent a summer with New York University's boot camp theatre program, The Practical Aesthetics Workshop. He has directed over 30 plays with Shotgun Players since 1992, including works by David Mamet, George Bernard shaw, Adam bock, Caryl Churchill, Euripides and Shakespeare, including Henry V, for which Shotgun won the 1998 Bay guardian Black Box Award. His crowning achievement is creating a theatre company that is affordable and where artists want to work.

Xia Ke Min

...is a chinese acrobatic instructor at the Circus Center in San Francisco. He began his career in clowning and acrobatics early in 1955 with the Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe. Three years later he was invited to join the Nanjing Acrobatic Troupe. Three years later he was invited to join the Nanjing Acrobatic Troupe. having 40 years performing and teaching experience both at home and abroad, he is recognized worldwide as one of the leading performers in his field. Mr. Xia has won a number of prizes in China's Nationwide Acrobatic Competition, and was awarded a second prize in Clown Performance. In addition, he was the recipient of the Mayor's Golden Prize at the Cirque du tomorrow competition in Paris in 1983.

Kimberly de Caires

...is a visual artist, and percussionist currently Artist in Residence at Sanchez Elementary School in San Francisco. She has created, planned and implemented curricula in a variety of media, including percussion instrument building and playing, mixed media, mask making, sculptural works, photography, storytelling, performance and more. She has taught for a number of arts organizations both locally and in the Chicago area including the Chicago Children's Museum, the Chicago Museum of Contermporary Art, The Old Town School of Folk Music, Marwen Foundation, Richmond Art Center and the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts, Habitot Museum for Children and more.

Rebecca Fisher

...is an actor and co-creator of the Spectrum Arts partnership with the Julia
Morgan Center for the Arts and Hearts Leap School. She has taught with the Dublin Theater company and the East Bay Regional Outdoor Performance Camp. She recently moved from Chicago where she performed with a number of professional children's theater companies, taught Shakespeare performance classes with InclusiveTheater and designed several arts-based workshops. She has trained with Shakespeare & Company and Wheaton College in Massachusetts as well as the American Conservatory Theatre.

Jeff Raz

...was the larger half of the clown duo Pino and Razz, touring nationally and internationally with the Pickle Family Circus. Jeff is a graduate of the Dell'Arte School of Physical Theater and a veteran of Make*A*Circus, Vaudeville Nouveau, and the Dell 'Arte Players Company. He performed in the famed production of Comedy of Errors with the Flying Karamazov brothers at the goodman Theater, the L.A. Olymic Arts Festival and on Broadway where it was made into a national PBS television special, "Live from Lincoln Center." For the last seven years he has worked tieh Artist Diversity Residency Program at the University of Nebraska.

Karis Griffin

...is a professional actor and dancer who has performed in the Bay Area and Southern California for the past 25 years. In addition to teaching in Oakland public schools, she has taught and performed at the Inner City Cultural Center in Los Angeles, and was the Administrative Director for the City Center Theater dance program in Pasadena. She taught and toured in Nigeria and participated in theater festivals in Slovakia, Cypress and Edinburgh. She holds a theatre degree from Cal State Hayward.

Simon Kaplan

...(Stage Director / Stage Door Conservatory) is a graduate of Northwestern University where he received his B.S. in Theater, with an academic focus on Children's Theater and Storytelling. Before joining Stage Door Conservatory in 2000, he co-founded the Theater Workshop Program at the Berkeley-Richmond Jewish Community Center, which he ran from 1997-1999. Simon has directed for both SDC's On Broadway program for 5th-9th graders, and Kids OnStage for 3rd-5th graders, and he was the camp director in 2001.