Leadership
Photo by Frank Wojciechowski
Michael Cadden
University Lecturer
Michael Cadden served as Chair of the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts, home of the Programs in Creative Writing, Dance, Theater, Music Theater, Visual Arts, and the Princeton Atelier, from 2011-2019. He is in his 40th year of teaching at Princeton; for nineteen of those years he served as Director of the Program in Theater (which was for many of those years the Program in Theater and Dance). He began his career at the Yale School of Drama, as a dramaturg at the Yale Rep under Lloyd Richards and as a lecturer in the dramaturgy, directing, and acting programs at the Drama School. Since 1981, he’s taught summer programs for high school teachers of English at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English, at its campuses in Vermont, Oxford, Santa Fe, Asheville, and Juneau. His areas of interest include Modern and Contemporary Theater, Dramaturgy, Comedy, the history of theatrical directing, Shakespeare in Performance, Australian literature and theater, and Ancient Greek Drama in Performance. He has led several Princeton Global Seminar on “Re:Staging the Greeks,” centered in Athens and Epidauros. In 1993, Michael was honored to receive Princeton’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. In 2003, he helped inaugurate the Roger S. Berlind Theater on the back lawn of the McCarter. In the Fall of 2017, he was among those who gleefully cut the ribbon to open the new Lewis Arts complex, an extraordinary milestone in Princeton’s plan to put the creative and performing arts at the heart of the Princeton experience.
Photo by Ron Wyatt
Jane Cox
Director of the Program in Theater, Professor of the Practice in Theater
Jane Cox is a lighting designer for theater, opera, dance and music based in Princeton, New Jersey. Jane has been teaching about light and theater design at Princeton University since 2007 and became Director of the Program in Theater in 2016. Her recent professional work includes The Marriage of Figaro at San Francisco Opera; Fefu and her Friends at Theater for a New Audience in NYC, directed by Princeton alumna Lileana Blain-Cruz; King Lear with Glenda Jackson on Broadway, directed by Sam Gold; a new musical adaptation of Secret Life of Bees (the design was nominated for a Drama Desk Award 2020); The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, directed by fellow faculty member John Doyle; a theatrical adaptation of Ta-Nehisi Coates book Between The World and Me, directed by Kamilah Forbes and a revival of True West on Broadway, directed by British director James McDonald.
Other exciting designs include Othello for the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park and Jitney on Broadway, both directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson; All the Way and Roe directed by Bill Rauch; Annie Baker’s The Flick, directed by Sam Gold; a new musical of Amelie, directed by Pam MacKinnon; Color Purple directed by John Doyle; and Hamlet directed by Lyndsey Turner (with Benedict Cumberbatch).
Jane has been nominated for two Tony awards, for her work on Jitney (2017) and on Machinal (2014). Jane has also been nominated for four Drama Desk awards and three Lortel awards, and in 2013, was awarded the Henry Hewes Design Award for her work on The Flick. In 2016, Jane was awarded the Ruth Morley Design Award by the League of Professional Theater Women, and a British What’s Onstage award for her work on Hamlet. In 2020, she received a special citation from the Henry Hewes Design Awards as part of the design team for María Irene Fornés’ Fefu and Her Friends.
Jane has been a company member of the Monica Bill Barnes Dance Company for twenty years. Highlights of work with the company include Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host with Ira Glass; a museum workout at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, partly developed at the Princeton Art Museum, with illustrator Maira Kalman; and Happy Hour, a piece involving karaoke, cocktails and suits. Jane has long-standing collaborations with directors John Doyle, Sam Gold and Bill Rauch, among others. Jane has taught at NYU (Tisch School of the Arts) where she also got her MFA in theater design, at Vassar (drama department) and Sarah Lawrence (dance department).
Stacy Wolf
Professor of Theater, Founding Director of Music Theater, Director of Fellowships
Stacy Wolf is one of America’s foremost scholars on musical theatre. She is Professor of Theater at Princeton, Director of Fellowships, and Director of Princeton’s new Program in Music Theater. She is the author of Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre Across America (Oxford University Press, 2020), which explores musical theater across the country in local and amateur venues like summer camps, high schools, and community theatres. Her chapter on Disney musicals in elementary schools appears in The Disney Musical: Stage, Screen, and Beyond.
Her recent publications include Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (Oxford University Press, 2011), A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (University of Michigan Press, 2002), and the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical (with Raymond Knapp and Mitchell Morris, 2011). She has published articles on theatre spectatorship, performance pedagogy, and musical theatre in many journals including Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, and Camera Obscura and was a former editor of Theatre Topics: A Journal of Pedagogy and Praxis. She also has experience as a director and dramaturg.
Other works include “’The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Music’: Musical Theatre at Girls’ Jewish Summer Camps in Maine, USA” (Contemporary Theatre Review, 2017); “The Feminine Mystique Goes to Broadway: Housewives in 1960s Musical Theater” (in The Sixties, Center Stage: Mainstream and Popular Performances in a Turbulent Decade, 2017); and “Keeping Company with Sondheim’s Women” (The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies, 2014). Her essay, “‘We’ll Always Be Bosom Buddies’: Female Duets and the Queering of Broadway Musical Theatre” in GLQ (Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, 2006), won the year’s award for Best Essay in Theatre Studies from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.
Wolf holds a B.A. in English from Yale and an M.A. in Drama from the University of Virginia. She received her Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to her current appointment, Wolf was an Associate Professor in the Performance as Public Practice Program in the Department of Theatre & Dance at the University of Texas at Austin, where she taught from 2000-2008. At Texas, Professor Wolf also taught in the Plan II Honors Program and received a Theatre & Dance teaching award in 2006. Her other teaching positions include Assistant Professor at George Washington University in English and Theatre and Dance (1996-2000) and Assistant Professor in the School of Theatre at Florida State University (1994-1996).
Wolf is a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow and received a 2017 President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University.
Past Leadership
(L to R) Paul Muldoon, Shirley M. Tilghman, Toni Morrison, and Peter B. Lewis. Photograph by Kevin Birch.
Peter B. Lewis ’55 (1933 – 2013)
The Lewis Center for the Arts is named in honor of Peter B. Lewis, a member of Princeton’s Class of 1955, a former Trustee, and one of the University’s most committed and generous supporters.
Lewis was a business leader who built Progressive Insurance from a company of just 40 employees into the third largest auto insurance company in the United States. But his legacy as a philanthropist may be even more distinctive than his career achievements. As a champion of Princeton, Lewis’s contributions are evident across campus and have impacted many academic disciplines, from genomics to contemporary art.
His 2006 lead gift of $101 million to endow the Lewis Center for the Arts followed closely on the heels of then President Shirley M. Tilghman’s Arts Initiative, which documented the needs and opportunities for the creative and performing arts at Princeton.
“Peter’s gift will give us an opportunity to establish Princeton more fully as a national and international destination for the very best students with talents and interests in the arts. This is also an opportunity to ensure that we offer students pursuing concentrations outside the arts the kind of meaningful artistic and cultural resources and experiences considered essential elements of an exceptional undergraduate education.”
— President Emerita Shirley M. Tilghman
Daniel Seltzer ’54 (1933-1980)
The 1939 creation of the Creative Arts Program (by the original campus hero of the arts, Dean Christian Gauss) not only created opportunities for its alums to come back to teach but to later create a whole range of new initiatives after World War II under the new Humanities Council in 1953.
One of the brilliant lights of Theatre Intime who was on campus when that happened was Daniel Seltzer ’54, who went on to a successful acting career while earning his Ph.D. and emerging as a noted Shakespeare scholar. Seltzer graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in 1954. Following graduate work at New College, Oxford, under a Fulbright Fellowship, he received his doctorate in English from Harvard in 1959. Seltzer joined the faculty at Harvard that year, rising to the position of full professor in 1967. In 1967, he began teaching Harvard’s first course for credit in techniques of acting. From 1965 until his departure to Princeton in 1970, Seltzer served as associate director of Harvard’s Loeb Drama Center. The dramatist came to Princeton as a professor of English and chairman of the faculty committee on McCarter Theatre.
Princeton lured him back to teach English and theater in 1970, and he became the first director of the new Program in Theater and Dance in 1972, just in time to catch the wave of coeducation and the increase in artistic demand on campus. He created the first course giving credit for production work at Intime, and played Falstaff in one of its Henry V, Part 1 productions, and in 1978 spring the Matthews Acting Studio—185 opens with the first production—Hamlet. Dan exerted a huge impact on the students before his jarring death from a heart attack in 1979. His infectious energy and intellect are luckily captured in the 1974 Oscar-winning Princeton: A Search for Answers, expressly created to attract a broader and highly inquisitive student body. The flourishing of the theater and dance program after Seltzer’s grounding was a key building block of the Lewis Center when President Shirley Tilghman and trustee Peter Lewis ’55 took up the banner for the arts in 2005, with the goal of involving every student.
Professor Daniel Seltzer ’54 headed Princeton’s Program in Theater and Dance since its inception in 1974. Seltzer’s position as director came as the capstone of a long career in the performing arts, an involvement which began during Seltzer’s undergraduate tenure at Princeton. The English professor had already stepped down as director before going on leave in January. He did not plan to resume the post on his return in the spring of 1981. “Dan really conceived of the program and built it,” said Provost Rudenstine, a close friend of Seltzer’s. At Princeton, Seltzer taught popular undergraduate- and graduate-level courses on the works of Shakespeare.
“Acting helps me think clearly about what I’m supposed to be teaching.”
— Daniel Seltzer ’54
In 1973, he was nominated by the New Jersey Drama Critics’ Association for a special award for his outstanding contribution to the development of McCarter. Seltzer relinquished the McCarter chairmanship in 1975, after watching the theater become a major regional theater, to concentrate on teaching. In his academic life, Seltzer focused his teaching and research on the literature and practice of the theater, concentrating in the drama of the English Renaissance and of the modern period. Teaching and acting were closely related for Seltzer, and he often assumed character roles to teach his popular courses in Shakespeare. During a tour in France, Seltzer played Hamm in a Paris production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, a performance that received critical acclaim in a front page review in Le Monde, Paris’ premier newspaper. Seltzer was a prominent actor as well as an academic. His performances included portrayals of Lear, Leontes, Falstaff, lago, Ulysses, Prospero, and Gonzalo in Shakespearean productions; Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman; Thomas More in A Man for all Seasons; and Tyrone Sr. in Long Day’s Journey into Night. He won a 1976 Theater World Award and a Tony nomination for best featured actor for his portrayal of Cohn in Jules Feiffer’s Knock Knock. “Acting helps me think clearly about what I’m supposed to be teaching,” Seltzer once said. Seltzer even had a role in the movie, An Unmarried Woman with Jill Clayburgh.
Dan also directed many plays. In 1977, Seltzer initiated a workshop which brought Chaikin to the faculty to work on a production of Endgame. The students in the workshop were asked to attend all rehearsals to get a true “sense of the growth and continuity of the play.” Seltzer played Hamm in the production. The workshop, according to Seltzer, was a “pre-pilot” for a program partially funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities which brought to Princeton in the spring term of 1978 a “performance teaching ensemble,” the first of its kind in this country. The program provides a long-term residency for professional artists of the theater who teach both formally and informally and prepare a major production of an important play to be produced in the late spring in The Acting Studio at 185 Nassau Street. Seltzer wrote essays & reviews for a number of scholarly journals. He held Dexter and Guggenheim Fellowships and lectured and taught at universities throughout of United States and abroad. Seltzer appeared in the NEH-sponsored 1973 television series, Humanities Film Forum, and he taught a seminar, “Shakespeare’s Development as a Dramatist,” in 1974 and 1976 in NEH summer programs for college teachers. He was a member of the Modern Language Association of America, the Shakespeare Association of America and the Malone Society, Oxford.
In an interview, Daniel Seltzer ’54 commented that “an actor who can both teach and act is very rare.” To his colleagues, students, and audiences over the years, Seltzer demonstrated his remarkable ability to combine scholarly study of theater with superb acting in a way that few others have done.
Outside of the classroom, many students and faculty knew Seltzer as “generous to a fault,” according to English professor Thomas P. Roche. “He was always willing to help students and younger faculty members.” Selflessness, perhaps Seltzer’s greatest strength also proved to be one of his weaknesses; he gave so much of himself to his students, his colleagues, and to professional theater, that he often had very little energy left. Seltzer’s devotion to theater seemed unlimited, however, and he continued to have a “brilliant and very rewarding and recognized career,” said Steve Gomar, an actor in Endgame with Seltzer in Paris. Seltzer’s death came suddenly after his return from Paris and was a shock to those who knew him. Seltzer was 47. “We are all just stunned by this .. . Anyone who knew Dan … is deeply grieved by the loss,” Roche said. Dan died March 1980. The news of Seltzer’s death came as a shock to the university community, especially to Seltzer’s colleagues in the theater and dance program and in the English department. English professor Alan Mokler, Acting Director of the Program in Theater and Dance, described Seltzer’s death as a “loss to Princeton University as well as to the professional acting community and to me personally.”
Melissa Smith (1957-2021)
Melissa Smith, after becoming a guest artist in a production of Fefu and Her Friends at Princeton University, accepted a position with the university in 1989 to run the Program in Theater and Dance where she also taught introductory, intermediate, and advanced acting.
She continued to teach at Princeton after leaving the program directorship in 1993. She taught acting to students across the continental United States, at the Mid Pacific Institute in Hawaii, NYU’s La Pietra campus in Florence, and the Teatro di Pisa in San Miniato, Italy. As an actor, Smith performed at the Hangar Theatre, ACT, the California Shakespeare Festival, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Primary Stages, and Soho Rep, as well as at the Barbican Theater in London, and Birmingham Rep in Birmingham.
As an actor, she performed in several shows in New York and locally at ACT, Berkeley Repertory Theater and California Shakespeare Theater. Melissa also taught at the Caymichael Patten Studio in Manhattan. During summers she taught at New York University’s La Pietra Campus in Florence, Italy, and at the Primo del Teatro in San Miniato, Italy. Her most prominent acting role was playing Frances McDormand’s sister in the multi-Academy Award-winning 2020 film Nomadland.
Smith served as ACT’s conservatory director for 25 years, starting in 1995. She transformed its MFA program, expanding it to a three-year offering ranked among the foremost graduate acting programs in the country. Melissa passed away in 2021.
Melissa has left a memory of performances, of words of encouragement and insight, the sound of laughter, a combination of impish humor and professional rigor and the image of a ” vivacious, sparklding comet.”
Tim Vasen (1964-2015)
Tim Vasen directed plays and taught classes in the Program in Theater from 1993 through 2015; he joined the faculty in 2003 and in 2012 became director of the Program in Theater until his untimely death in 2015.
Raised in Culver City, California, Vasen earned a bachelor’s degree in American studies at Yale University in 1987, graduating summa cum laude. He received a master of fine arts in directing from the Yale School of Drama in 1993. In spring of that year, Michael Cadden, then the incoming director of the Program in Theater and Dance at Princeton, hired Vasen to direct the program’s fall show — Moliere’s The Misanthrope.
“I was impressed from the first by Tim’s passionate commitment to working with the students as artistic collaborators on the kind of work that demanded their full investment,” Cadden said. “Tim always insisted theater was first and foremost about people in a room together, figuring something out. Initially, the artists; eventually to be joined by an audience.”
After a few years of part-time work at Princeton, Vasen pursued the itinerant life of a young theater director, working at Playwrights Horizons in New York City; Philadelphia Theatre Company; South Coast Repertory in Orange County, California; Chautauqua Theater Company in upstate New York; and the Children’s Theater Company in Minneapolis. From 1997 to 2003, Vasen served as resident director at Center Stage, a professional regional theater company in Baltimore, directing new work and classics, as well as commissioning and developing new plays by Lynn Nottage, Danny Hoch and Warren Leight; producing the Off Center solo performer series; and overseeing a Pew Residency for deaf theater artist Willy Conley.
Vasen returned to Princeton in 2003, when he began to see what educational theater had to offer that could not be easily found in the professional world. Vasen’s university directing credits include many classical plays and classic works — Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Brecht, Chekhov, Ibsen, Synge, Beckett and Williams — as well as new works by emerging student playwrights at Princeton, Yale School of Drama and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. A number of his former Princeton students asked him to direct their postgraduate work including Three Plays by Rebecca Foresman, a 2010 alumna, at Dixon Place in New York City in 2013; and Wanderland by Veronica Siverd, also a member of the Class of 2010, at Little Times Square Theater and Festival Tour in 2012.
“Tim did a marvelous job directing the Program in Theater, reaching out to colleagues across the University to explore artistic-scholarly collaborations,” Cadden said. “Tim always argued that university arts programs are in a particularly good position to benefit from the intellectual and artistic resources of their surrounding community.”
Vasen’s courses were often cross-listed with other disciplines, including Slavic languages and literatures, music, and Hellenic studies. For example, in collaboration with Cadden and the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Vasen created the recurring course “Re: Staging the Greeks,” which has been a conduit between Princeton students and Greek theater artists since 2008. In summer 2012, he and Cadden, in conjunction with the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, adapted the course for a Global Seminar to Greece, enabling students to visit and perform plays from the ancient Greek canon on the very stages used by their theatrical predecessors.
Vasen became a recognized authority among theater scholars and practitioners for directing world premieres of un-produced Soviet-era projects, often in collaboration with fellow artists and scholars including Princeton’s Caryl Emerson, the A. Watson Armour, III, University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Emeritus, and professor of comparative literature, emeritus; Simon Morrison, professor of music; Rebecca Lazier, senior lecturer in dance in the Lewis Center for the Arts; and Michael Pratt, conductor of the Princeton University Orchestra and director of the Program in Musical Performance.
“Tim was everything you could want in a teacher, a mentor and a colleague.”
— Robert Sandberg
These productions, featuring student performers, included an unfinished 1930s collaboration between Prokofiev and Meyerhold on Pushkin’s Boris Godunov in 2007 and an unfinished 1930s collaboration between Prokofiev and Sigizmund Krzhiszanovsk on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in 2012. In 2013, at the prompting of Pratt, Vasen also directed Der Bourgeois Bigwig, a new translation and adaptation by James Magruder of the Molière comedy Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme as adapted by Hugo von Hofmannsthal in collaboration with Richard Strauss. The Boris Godunov production began a series of Russia-centered collaborations with the Program in Theater and Department of Music “that put our tiny Slavic department on the map of Princeton’s performing arts landscape,” said Emerson. Vasen went on to co-teach four courses in Russian literature and drama in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, “helping the traditional library-bound academic to ’teach and learn with the whole body,’” Emerson said. “His enthusiasm for Russian culture, from little-known prose writers like Krzhizhanovsky up through this year’s fall show, Bulgakov’s Zoyka’s Apartment, was an inspiration. To a literature that is, as a rule, deep, mournful or manic, Tim consistently brought high spirits, common sense and the most ingenious embodiment.”
“Tim was everything you could want in a teacher, a mentor and a colleague,” said Robert Sandberg, a lecturer English, theater and the Lewis Center for the Arts. “He was warm, open, caring, straightforward, passionate and whip-smart. There was no one more direct and honest; you always knew where you stood with Tim. “He wanted the very best for the students,” Sandberg said. “He urged them to challenge themselves, to dream big, and he supported them as they journeyed on their artistic paths. He was the best audience anyone could wish for: his energy, enthusiasm and that wonderful laugh filled up the whole house, affirming the act of theater and embracing the vitality of life.”
“Tim was a great friend and colleague, a truly gifted director, a phenomenal teacher and generous mentor,” said Florent Masse, a senior lecturer in the Department of French and Italian. “He will be terribly missed by everyone he inspired, mentored and coached. I’ll always cherish the opportunities I had to collaborate with Tim, learning from his work and vision for the development of the arts on campus.”
Masse remembered traveling to France on two occasions with Vasen and students. “As recently as last summer, we were celebrating an exciting day of theater at the Avignon Festival around a delicious meal Tim had graciously prepared for us in his apartment. It was a memorable night of dynamic and passionate exchanges on theater traditions, cultures and the arts,” Masse said.
As director of the Program in Theater, Vasen also helped to bring renowned theater artists to the University as faculty including Tony Award-winning directors John Doyle and John Rando, designers Jane Cox and Ricardo Hernandez, and scholars such as Brian Herrera (winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism) and guest artists such as the contemporary dance and theater ensemble Witness Relocation. Vasen also reviewed arts supplements from hundreds of high school students applying for admission to Princeton, often reaching out to promising young prospective students to acquaint them with the University’s academic programs in the arts.
Darryl Waskow, the Lewis Center’s producer in theater and dance, said, “Tim’s strength was in how he got the best work out of the students, faculty, guests and staff. He grew the program in many ways. But while the expansion of our programming was a success, those who worked most closely with Tim saw that he did his best work one-on-one with the students. What I’ll always remember about Tim was his work on small-scale, student projects, where he shined in guiding students in developing their work,” Waskow said.
Vasen often stayed in contact with former students and was instrumental in starting the Princeton Arts Alumni group with Pilar Castro Kiltz, a member of the Class of 2010. “Through to this day, I navigate my work as a director, choreographer and playwright with inspiration and lessons from Tim as my guide,” said Castro Kiltz. “Without Tim, the Princeton Arts Alumni would not exist; Tim’s dedication to developing and supporting us as artists endured well after we graduated. His spirit of exploration, curiosity and enthusiasm will continue to resonate and multiply as those of us who were lucky to count him as teacher, mentor and friend go forward ever influenced by him.” In 2013, the Princeton Arts Alumni launched with Pilar Castro, and the Program in Theater with Tim Vasen in the Lead of LCA support.
“I knew Tim Vasen for 10 years,” said Lileana Blain-Cruz, a freelance director and a member of Princeton’s Class of 2006. “At Princeton, he was my thesis adviser on my production of Shange’s for colored girls… and continued to be an incredible mentor and adviser to me at the Yale School of Drama, particularly on my thesis production, Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. “Tim was a force of energy, ideas, imagination and love for the human spirit,” Blain-Cruz said, “and he inspired that same joie de vivre in his students in me. I am indebted to him for his insights; for encouraging me in those dark hours of creative angst; for talking about the Greeks, Thornton Wilder and Gertrude Stein; for giving me an opportunity to direct and teach Much Ado About Nothing at Princeton as the fall show in 2013; and for encouraging us to be fearless and joyful in the journey of making art,” she said.
“Once he committed full-time to Princeton,” Cadden said, “Tim’s principal professional credit beyond Princeton was his work with final year [MFA] actors at the Yale School of Drama, where he prepared the actors for the scene work they would perform as an ensemble for agents and casting directors in New York and Los Angeles. He also advised [MFA] directors on their choice of a final thesis project and the ways in which they might tackle it. Needless to say, his position at Yale spoke to the faith the country’s premier theatrical training ground had in the quality of his work with his student charges.” And he taught or directed at a number of professional training programs, including NYU’s Tisch Graduate Acting Program and the Academy for Classical Acting at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington. He spent a number of years as Resident Director at CENTERSTAGE in Baltimore, directing new work and classics as well as commissioning and developing new plays and adventurous performance work..
Dec 17, 2015…..What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Race and the Arts, Under Tim Vasen, the first meeting between faculty & students was held on casting practices and student led calls for open casting in the program. This was the first of many equity, climate and diversity conversations still ongoing between students and faculty.
In honor of former Program in Theater director Tim Vasen, the Tim Vasen Award is presented to a senior who has demonstrated dedication, passion, risk-taking, and significant accomplishment in the making of theater throughout his or her years at Princeton.
Guest Artists & Speakers
David Bengali ’04
David Bengali is a lighting and projection designer based in New York City. He completed his M.F.A. in Design for Stage and Film at New York University. He is a Princeton alumnus, class of 2004 with a B.S.E. in computer science and certificates in theater and Italian. His recent design credits include The Temple Bombing at Alliance Theatre; Uncommon Sense at Tectonic Theater Project; Anna Akhmatova and Jules Verne: From The Earth To The Moon at Brooklyn Academy of Music; Ring of Fire at Endstation Theatre; The Tempest at Classic Stage Company; Kill Me Like You Mean It at Stolen Chair; Two Point Oh at 59E59; I Forgive You Ronald Reagan and The Sensational Josephine Baker at Theatre Row; Cav/Pag at Tri Cities Opera; Little Nemo in Slumberland at Sarasota Opera; and productions at The New Victory, Soho Rep, Jamal Jackson Dance, and Ephrat Asherie Dance. His recent associate design credits include The Last Ship, Amélie, and Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway, and La Donna Del Lago at the Metropolitan Opera. He has taught as a guest lecturer in undergraduate drama and graduate dance at New York University.
Dylan Blau Edelstein
Dylan Blau Edelstein is a PhD candidate in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at Princeton University, where he also teaches introductory language classes. He holds a B.A. from Princeton (Class of 2017), also in Spanish and Portuguese, with a certificate in Theater. As an undergrad, he acted in a number of campus productions, including his senior thesis: Beautiful Girls: A Musical Playdate (May 2017). Devised alongside Jules Peiperl and Carey Camel, and directed by Elena Araoz, Beautiful Girls used the music of Stephen Sondheim to play with issues of identity, casting, and queerness. It was also the final thesis production in the Matthews Acting Studio, before the inauguration of the new Lewis Arts complex. Dylan continued to act for several years after graduating, in multiple seasons of Princeton Summer Theater and in children’s theater productions in NYC. He is also a translator (from Portuguese and Spanish into English). His current PhD research looks at historical crossings between literature, visual arts, and the field of psychiatry — and more specifically, the way vanguard writers and artists in mid-20th-century Brazil interacted with and were inspired by the art produced by patients at psychiatric hospitals in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.
Alice Eve Cohen ’76
Alice Eve Cohen (’76, P’12, ’21) is a playwright, solo theatre artist, and author. Winner of the Jane Chambers Feminist Playwriting Award, National Jewish Playwriting Contest, Elle Literary Grand Prix, and Oprah magazine’s 25 Best Books of Summer, she teaches playwriting at The New School and Augsburg University MFA Program.
Victoria Davidjohn ’19
Assistant Director of MJ the Musical—Broadway and First National Tour. Ph.D. Student in Africana Studies at Brown University. Previously: Associate Director of Into the Woods: 2022 Revival—Broadway, National Tour, and New York City Center. Inaugural Director of Trenton Youth Theater, Trenton Arts at Princeton.
Vince di Mura
Vince di Mura has appeared on concert stages and theaters throughout North America, Canada, Europe and Latin America. He has conducted theater seasons in virtually every region of the United States. He is best known for his arrangements of My Way: A Tribute to the Music of Frank Sinatra, Simply Simone, and I Left My Heart, (with over 900 productions nationally). He is also the author of A Conversation With The Blues, a 14 part web instructional series on improvisation through the Blues produced by Soundfy Inc. He holds fellowships from the William Goldman Foundation, Temple University, Meet the Composer, CEPAC, the Union County Foundation, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Puffin Cultural Forum, and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. He has six CDs on the market including his most recent release, Ybor City Preludes (2022). In 2022, di Mura completed a collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa entitled Echos of the Great Migration, which is currently being workshopped for a New York premiere in 2024. He has also collaborated with Princeton alumni Philicia Saunders and Roger Q. Mason on their award winning 2020 film, Breathe. Di Mura is currently the musical director and primary arranger of Summer Wind Chinese Jazz Ensemble and is engaged as a solo pianist, giving concerts in Europe and the United States.
Lovell Holder ’09
Lovell Holder is a filmmaker whose feature films include Peak Season (SXSW 2023), The End of Us (SXSW 2021), Working Man, and Some Freaks. Most recently, he directed the world premiere of the play Lavender Men and its subsequent feature film adaptation, which will be released in 2024.
abigail jean-baptiste ’18
abigail jean-baptiste is a theater maker born & based in New York. Guided by questions around blackness, feminization and kinship, they make work in search of nonsensical ways of being.
Alan Mokler MacVey
Alan Mokler MacVey is an Emeritus Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Iowa. He taught directing and acting at the University from 1991 to 2022. He chaired the department for twenty-nine years and was also Director of the Division of Performing Arts from 2006 until his retirement. From 1977 to 1991 he served on the faculty at Princeton University. Working closely with Daniel Seltzer, who founded the program in Theatre and Dance three years earlier, he created and directed the Acting Ensemble, a group of Equity actors who presented one or two major productions a year and brought their talents to a wide variety of Princeton courses. In 1980 he became interim director of the program, and from 1982 to 1989 was its director.
From 1976 to 2015 he was on the summer faculty of the Bread Loaf School of English, a graduate program of Middlebury College, where, in 1986, he re-established the Acting Ensemble. For twenty-seven years, he served as its artistic director. In a long career, he directed over a hundred productions, including work at Trinity Repertory Company, the Cleveland Playhouse, North Light Theatre, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, the McCarter Theatre, the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger, the Theatre of the Riverside Church, En Garde Arts in New York, and other companies.
For seven years Alan also served as Chair of the UI Arts Advancement Committee, which helped develop innovative programs across the arts. These included the Public Digital Arts cluster, the Be Creative Engineering program, the Writers Room, and many other efforts. In the department he developed the Partnership in the Arts program and the Music Theatre track.
Alan is a fellow in the College of Fellows of the American Theatre and Past President of the National Association of Schools of Theatre. He is a recipient of the Regents Award for Faculty Excellence and was a Collegiate Fellow in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. In 2014 he delivered the University of Iowa Presidential Lecture.
Cara Reichel
Cara Reichel graduated from Princeton in 1996 and founded Prospect Theater Company in 1998 along with fellow Princeton alumni Peter Mills, Melissa Huber and Tony Vallés. She is the Producing Artistic Director of Prospect Theater and a leader in the field of new musical theater development. Reichel is the recipient of an Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Director, a Lucille Lortel Award for Emerging Women Artists, and New Directors/New Works Grants from the Drama League. She has directed works at the O’Neill Theatre Center and the National Alliance for Musical Theatre’s Festival of New Musicals. Additionally, Reichel has participated in the Goodspeed Musicals Johnny Mercer Writers Colony, the Weston Playhouse Artists’ Retreat, the Rhinebeck Writers’ Retreat, and she received a Bogliasco Fellowship.
Bob Sandberg
Playwright Bob Sandberg has been teaching playwriting, acting, and dramatic literature as a lecturer in the Program in Theater and the English Department at Princeton since 1995. He was a Princeton undergraduate member of the Class of 1970, majoring in History with certificates in American and African American Studies.
His plays have been seen in Australia, Canada, England, Japan, Panama, and South Korea as well at U.S. theaters such as the Barter, Dallas Children’s Theater, Idaho Shakespeare Festival, Intiman, La Mama, Providence Black Rep, Stages Repertory Theatre and Yale Cabaret. He has been commissioned by, among others, McCarter Theatre, Metro Theater Company, and on four occasions, Seattle Children’s Theatre. Recent work includes Zabel in Exile developed with Merrimack Repertory Theater; Roundelay at Passage Theatre; IRL: In Real Life for George Street Playhouse; Convivencia developed with Playwrights Theatre of NJ and The Growing Stage; What Can’t Be Seen, developed at the Provincetown Playhouse; and The Judgment of Bett, part of the Kennedy Center’s New Visions/New Voices in conjunction with the American Repertory Theatre. His plays are published by Playscripts and Dramatic Publishing, and have been supported by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Theatre Communications Group and many state and local arts commissions.
In addition to his playwriting, Sandberg has directed Greek tragedy, comic opera, Brecht, Chekhov and contemporary plays by writers as different as Lewis Black, Anna Deavere Smith and Wendy Wasserstein. Before joining the faculty at Princeton, Sandberg was the Chair of the Theater Department and Director of the Professional Acting Conservatory at Cornish College of the Arts.
Sandberg taught classes on introductory playwriting, advanced studies in acting, modern drama, world drama, challenging drama for youth, and other special topics courses including “Theatrical Writing Studio” and “August Wilson: African American Life in the 20th Century,” among others. In addition to teaching, Sandberg directed theater productions for senior students completing their certificate requirements for the program, including recent productions of Machinal, Fun Home, and Mother Courage and Her Children.
In 2014, he received a President’s Distinguished Teaching Award. Numerous alumni nominated Sandberg for the award and emphasized his role as an influential mentor. One former student, advised by Sandberg for his original senior thesis play, wrote that “He is the single-most important, most grounding, most inspiring, most wonderful mentor I have ever had.” Princeton alums and award-winning professional theater artists, playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins ’06 and director Lileana Blain-Cruz ’06, speak to Sandberg’s influence on their trajectories in the theater world in a video documenting the premiere of Gurls for the opening festival at the new Lewis Arts complex in fall 2017.
Bob was Acting Director of the Program in Theater and Dance (Spring 2004), the Program in Theater (Spring 2016), Atelier (Fall 2016), and the Program in Music Theater (2017-2018). He was the advisor of over 100 thesis students as they created new plays, musicals, and performance pieces.
Bob retired from teaching in 2021, but his association with the theater program continues as a welcomed advisor and director. Bob directed a student project in spring 2022 in the Drapkin, Shalom Bayit. Bob is the writing advisor on a new musical Gaucho and in spring 2024 will co-direct a senior production of Flight of a Legless Bird (Berlind Theater). Global Theatre Anthologies: Ancient, Indigenous, and Modern Plays from Africa and the Diaspora, which he co-edited with Simon Gikandi as the first in a multi-volume series, will be published by Methuen in November.
Paul Schiff Berman ’88
Paul Schiff Berman ’88 was Artistic Director of Spin Theater, a NYC-based performance company, from 1988-1995 and directed multiple original theater works for the company. He was also Administrative Director of The Wooster Group. Since 1998, Berman has been a law professor and is currently on the faculty of the George Washington University Law School. He has recently returned to theater and is developing a new work to be produced by Ping Chong & Co. in New York City.
Photo by Caroline Yang
Talvin Wilks ’85
Talvin Wilks, Dramaturg: for colored girls… (2022 Broadway Revival), Director: The Till Trilogy (Mosaic Theatre, DC). He is an Associate Professor in the Theatre Arts and Dance Department, University of Minnesota/Twin Cities.
