PTO Board of Directors
Board Officers
Alexander Santiago-Jirau (President)
Alexander Santiago-Jirau is a Master's candidate in Educational Theatre at New York University, focusing on Theatre of the Oppressed, Applied Theatre and Drama in Education. Since receiving a degree in Urban and Regional Studies from Cornell University, Alex has worked in neighborhood planning, environmental justice, teacher recruitment and youth development for various New York City non-profits. An educator, advocate and theatre artist committed to the use of theatre for community development, Alex has been a Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner for nine years; he has studied under Augusto Boal and has facilitated multiple workshops with queer youth, youth in foster care, and diverse immigrant communities. In his present position as Associate Program Director for Career Development at The Center for Arts Education, Alex counsels youth pursuing arts careers and leads professional development workshops for New York City educators and youth development professionals. In 2008 Alex co-founded The Forum Project, a training and facilitation company that designs custom workshops, community projects, performances, and trainings around social justice issues.
Kelly Howe (President-Elect)
Kelly Howe is an artist, teacher, and writer based in Austin, Texas, where she loves to direct new plays by local playwrights. She also facilitates a summer performance-devising program for youth in Louisville, Kentucky's Portland neighborhood. Kelly's writing appears in Theatre Topics and Theatre Journal. As a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas, Kelly writes primarily about twenty-first century Legislative Theatre projects and, more generally, relationships between TO, materialist feminism, and critical race theory.
Toby Emert (Past-President)
Toby Emert is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education and Director of Teacher Education at Agnes Scott College near Atlanta, Georgia. He also teaches in the Creative Arts in Learning Graduate Program for Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts--a gig that has him traveling around the country working with teachers to incorporate the creative arts into their curricula and classrooms.
Katherine Burke (Secretary)
Katherine Burke teaches in the School of Theatre and Dance at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, where she lives with her daughter and husband. She has led TO and other applied and interactive theatre workshops/trainings across the US and in the countries of Georgia and Tunisia. In addition she works as an actor, director, singer, and vocal coach. Information about Katherine's applied theatre work can be found at www.interplaytheatre.com.
Charles Adams (Treasurer)
Charles Adams is ABD in the Theatre Historiography program at the University of Minnesota. His research is in areas of theatre and social change, especially in the fields of Theatre in Education, critical pedagogies, and transformation. He has worked as a teaching artist for 15 years, training novice teaching artists as well as teaching educators in methodologies and philosophies for using embodiment as a means of resisting dehumanizing modes of education.
Board Members
Hector Aristizabal
Hector Aristizabal is a native from Medellin Colombia and currently lives in Los Angeles, CA. Hector's commitment to human rights work forced him to leave his country in 1989 due to death threats. Hector holds an MA degree in Psychology from Colombia and a degree as a Marriage Family Therapist from Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena. As the Founder, Director of ImaginAction, Hector works as an independent consultant for several organizations in different cities of the US and Canada. He travels internationally to countries such as: Colombia, Mexico, Jamaica, Germany, The Netherlands, England, Greece, Croatia, Ireland, Austria, India, Israel and Palestine, offering his unique blend of techniques combining Theater of the Oppressed and "Council Circle" to work with communities dealing with difficult challenges.
Melinna Bobadilla
Melinna "Teatrina" Bobadilla Chávez is a Chican@ teatrista, TO practitioner, actor, singer, bilingual teaching artist and Capricorn currently pursuing her MA in Educational Theater [in Colleges and Communities] in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University. She hails from California where she attended UC Berkeley and majored in Ethnic Studies with a focus on Chican@ arts and media, thus solidifying her passion for the fusion of theater and the struggle for social justice to create "a world where many worlds fit" (EZLN). Melinna trained with Teatro Visión of San Jose, CA in Chicano Theater and Theater of the Oppressed at their summer Institúto de Teatro. She has facilitated workshops and lectured on both Theater of the Oppressed and Chicano Theater at UC Santa Cruz, San Francisco State University, various high schools throughout CA, migrant education programs, the Garment Worker's Center, and most notably, at the International Hip Hop Symposium in Havana Cuba where she led a workshop and created a Hip Hop Forum Theater piece focusing on the spread of HIV/AIDS in Cuba. In 2005, Melinna began training with prestigious playwright/director Luis Valdez (Zoot Suit, La Bamba) at the renowned El Teatro Campesino (The Farmworker's Theater Company), which was founded by Valdez in 1965 in solidarity with the farm worker's struggles led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. With El Teatro Campesino, Melinna served as an artistic associate, ensemble member, and most recently as the Educational Theater Program Coordinator. She has also worked with MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund) as their Youth Leadership Program Coordinator, directing after-school programming for LA high school students focusing on the power of using art as a vehicle for social change, as well as providing culturally relevant, civil rights oriented lessons. She was a core ensemble member of Teatro East of the River (LA) and has performed with theater troupes such as ChUSMA,Head Rush and is currently performing with the New York based group ACES(Arte Colectivo en Solidaridad/ Arts Community Education Solidarity). She is passionate about using theater (Chicano/bilingual/hip hop/guerilla/ TO) and popular education in contributing to the mental/social/economic and spiritual liberation of all oppressed people, especially immigrant, indigenous and youth of color communities. Consientização! In' Lak Ech.
Jasmin Cardenas
Jasmin Cardenas is an arts educator, storyteller, actress, choreographer and TO practioner. Using theater as a social change agent she enjoys facilitating TO workshops for youth from vastly different communities to come together and dialogue on difficult topics in hopes of finding solutions and common ground. As a writer, performer and producer she created and tours ‘Niña Buena?', a one woman show that explores her Colombian roots and first-generation-American-status. As a storyteller she can be found performing folk tales and personal stories for all ages in the U.S. and abroad and is performing member of Serendipity Theater Collective's 2nd Story: Monthly Series Cycle. This Chicago native is an arts educator in partnership with Lookingglass Theater Co., Silk Road Theater Co and ENLACE Chicago, amoung others.
Ben Fink
Ben Fink is a Joker, teacher, director, singer, and writer living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has facilitated TO workshops and performances in the United States and Germany, in secondary and postsecondary educational settings. Ben is an instructor in the department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, where he uses techniques from PO and TO to teach cultural studies as a path to citizenship and public engagement. Ben was co-producer of the 2009 PTO Conference.
Sonja Kuftinec
Sonja Arsham Kuftinec works as a facilitator in community-based theatre and conflict transformation. Since 1995 she has developed collaborative theatre projects with youth in the Balkans and Middle. Her new book, Theatre, Facilitation and Nation Formation in the Balkans and Middle East follows Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater (2003). She is currently experimenting with more dialogic forms of communication, working on several co-authored articles. Sonja also teaches performance and social change at the University of Minnesota. She served as the lead organizer of PTO's 2007 conference in Minneapolis.
Simon Malbogat
Simon is a co-founder of Mixed Company Theatre and its Artistic Director. A Forum Theatre specialist, Simon has been acting and directing for more than 35 years. He has studied with theatre icons Augusto Boal, Jerzy Grotowski, and Eugenio Barba. Simon has led workshops in schools, communities and workplaces, in Canada and internationally. He has directed productions across Canada, from the Belfry in Victoria, B.C., to the Centaur in Montreal, Quebec. Internationally, he has brought Mixed Company's work to Finland, Ukraine, Turkey, Israel, India and Brazil. Simon has directed more than 100 Forum Plays including Mixed Company's Dora Mavor Moore Award-nominated plays, Showdown and HIV/AIDS Toolbox. Simon has also taught theatre at the University of Toronto, Brock University, York University, Humber College and the Theatre Ontario Summer Programs at Brock University and Queen's University.
Doug Paterson (Emeritus)
Doug Paterson is Professor of Theatre at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. While he has published on numerous topics, his passion remains theatre and social change. He is co-founder of three theatres including the Dakota Theatre Caravan in South Dakota, the Circle Theatre in Omaha, and an Omaha group dedicated to TO work. To date he has offered over 200 Theatre of the Oppressed workshops and presentations in Omaha, across the US, and around the world. International sites include Rio de Janeiro, Israel, Iraq, Liberia, Australia, India, and Palestine. Doug began the Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed series of international Conferences in 1995, now in its fifteenth year. Doug Paterson continues to work actively to promote the work of Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire and is a peace and social justice activist in the Great Plains.
Richard Piatt
Rick is a Ph.D. candidate in drama at Goldsmiths, University of London, an Augustinian friar, and theatre practitioner. Academically his current area of interest is in the dynamic histories and potentialities for dialogue between and among Frerian pedagogy, theatre of the oppressed and Latin American Theologies of Liberation. He has been a member of PTO since 2007.
alejandra c. Tobar-alatriz
alejandra c. Tobar-alatriz is native of Santiago, Chile. Having rocked gently in the cradle of a nonviolent revolution, she danced her way through cultural change when her family relocated to Houston, TX at the age of 10. After receiving her 'papelito' from the University of Texas at Austin where she studied dance, theater, languages and psychology, she moved to New York to work with the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) through their Youth and Racial and Economic Justice programs. It was her work with the Nonviolent Youth Collective of the FOR that brought her to her most recent home in Minneapolis, MN. An artist, performer, writer, daughter, friend and r-evolutionary, she is a Global Somatics Apprentice with Suzanne River (www.globalsomatics.com) and an organizer for a program called Latinos En Accion. alejandra is on the Muste Foundation Counter Recruitment Fund, Moving Lives Speakers Bureau with Intermedia Arts and is an Auntie to Tara, who is two years of age.
Cheryl L. Wilson
A natural organizer, Cheryl Wilson started off as a single mother who became a Parent Educator for the Minneapolis Public Schools. She now has 29 years of experience in community organizing. She has worked within the educational systems around issues of parental involvement and parent education. Cheryl moved away to rural Minnesota where she provided direct services to African/African American community members in domestic violence, sexual assault, abused children and general crime through a Latino organization. When back in the urban context, Ms. Wilson has been the Director of the Morris Miller Youth Center and has recently developed an Organizing Project of African American Congregations to enhance the power of community through organizing. Cheryl studied business for non-profits at the College of St. Thomas, MN. In her continual journey through life and learning, she has participated with the Center for Third World Organizing, Organizing Apprenticeship Project, Highlander Research and Education Center, Pedagogy and Theater of the Oppressed and Midwest Academy, among many. Cheryl is a mother of four biological children and four other children that she has raised. She is also a grandmother to thirty-six.
Kate Wintz
Kate has been utilizing Theatre of the Oppressed since 2004 when she was introduced to it as one of Brent Blairs Theatre & Therapy students at USC and interned at Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services, using TO to spark dialogue among adolescents in the foster care program. After graduating from San Francisco State University, she moved to her hometown of Omaha and assisted Doug Paterson in organizing the 2008 PTO Conference and has continued her work, including introducing TO to after-school programs and on-grounds at a local zoo. She is now in the University of Nebraska-Omaha pursuing an M.A. in Theatre Scholarship. Kate is also a teaching artist, dancer, and activist.