FACULTY MENTORS

LAURA SCHELLHARDT - Laura Schellhardt is a playwright and adaptor. Her original works include Upright Grand, Air Guitar High, Auctioning the Ainsleys (Jeff Award Nominee), The Apothecary's Daughter, How to Remove Blood From a Carpet, The K of D (Jeff Award Nominee, 2010 NYC Fringe Festival Best New Play Award), Courting Vampires, Shapeshifter, Inheritance, and Je Ne Sais Quoi. Adaptations include The Phantom Tollbooth, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, The Outfit (Jeff Award Nominee), and< Creole Folktales. She is also the author of Screenwriting for Dummies. Schellhardt is a recipient of the TCG National Playwriting Residency, the Jerome Fellowship, the New Play Award from ACT in Seattle, and a Dramatist Guild Playwriting Fellowship. She has participated in the SoHo Rep Writer/Director Lab, the Women Playwrights Festival at SRC, The Kennedy Center's New Voices/New Visions Festival, The Bonderman TYA Symposium, and the O'Neill National Playwright's Festival. She received her graduate degree from Brown University, under the tutelage of Paula Vogel. Schellhardt oversees the undergraduate playwriting initiative in the Department of Theatre.

AMANDA DENHERT - Amanda Dehnert’s recent directing credits include Cabaret for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Romeo and Juliet for the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, and developmental workshops of the new musicals Not Wanted On The Voyage (Brian Hill/Neil Bartram) and Unlocked (Sam Carner/Derek Gregor). She is also a resident director with Trinity Repertory Company, a regional theatre in Providence, Rhode Island, which was founded by Adrian Hall. She was in residence there for many years, and her positions ranged from Artistic Associate to Acting Artistic Director. Productions included My Fair Lady; Annie; West Side Story; Charles Strouse’s You Never Know (world premiere); Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience; The Mystery of Edwin Drood; Henry IV; A Moon for the Misbegotten; The Skin of Our Teeth; Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up; Noises Off; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; The New England Sonata (world premiere); Othello; Saint Joan; We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay!; A Christmas Carol (1997 and 2005), and Cyrano de Bergerac. She has worked regionally with Actor’s Theatre of Louisville, the Cleveland Playhouse, the Virginia Stage Company, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She has also composed original scores and songs for the theatre work of Oskar Eustis, Kevin Moriarty, Michael Goldfried, Mark Sutch, and Peter Sampieri.

MASI ASARE - Masi Asare, PhD is an associate professor of theatre and performance studies at Northwestern University, where she is also affiliated with the sound arts and industries program and the Black Arts Consortium. She is a Tony-nominated songwriter whose work includes Paradise Square (Broadway, Chicago), Monsoon Wedding (Off-Broadway, Delhi, Doha), Odyssey (SF Bay Area, national tour), and Marian, or the True Tale of Robin Hood: The Musical (Concord Theatricals). As a composer and dramatist, she has been commissioned by Theatre Royal Stratford East, the Lilly Awards, and Marvel. Masi’s voice students have performed on Broadway and worldwide, and her scholarly book Blues Mamas and Broadway Belters comes out from Duke University Press in the fall of 2024. She is co-editor of a special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre on “The Musical-Theatrical Global South” (forthcoming 2025) with research supported by the NU Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. A past Dramatists Guild Fellow and Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Fellow, Masi’s honors include the Ziegfeld Award for a woman composer of musicals, a grant from the Theater Hall of Fame, and inclusion on the “Women to Watch on Broadway” list. She has also published with the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, Journal of Popular Music Studies, TDR, The Routledge Companion to Musical Theatre, and Performance Matters. Masi is a member of ASCAP, the Dramatists Guild, and the Recording Academy, where she is a Grammy Awards voter.

TOMMY RAPLEY - Tommy Rapley is a nationally renowned theatre professional with a passion for visually impactful and highly physical storytelling intended to generate a sense of community with its audience and created in a process of ensemble collaboration. As a company member with The House Theatre of Chicago, he has served variously as actor, director, writer, choreographer, musician and part-time bartender in order to bring over 30 world-premiere plays to the stage. A vibrant incubator for original work, The House has been "uniting Chicago in the Spirit of Community through amazing feats of Storytelling" since 2001 with such hits as Death and Harry Houdini, The Sparrow, The Terrible Tragedy of Peter Pan, and their critically acclaimed productions of The Nutcracker, which Tommy co-created and has directed since 2007.

His work as a director and choreographer has been seen on stages around Chicago at: Chicago Children's Theatre (Frederick, The Hundred Dresses, A Year with Frog and Toad), The Goodman Theatre (A Christmas Carol, The Winter's Tale, Support Group for Men, The Matchmaker), Steppenwolf Theatre Company (Detroit), Writer's Theatre (Vietgone, Days Like Today), The Court Theatre (Man in the Ring), The Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire (The King and I, City of Angels) and many more.

He has had the opportunity to work nationally at fine institutions such as: Oregon Shakespeare Theatre, Hartford Stage Company, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kansas City Repertory Theatre, The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, The New Victory Theatre and Olney Theatre Center where he earned a Helen Hayes nomination for Outstanding Choreography for their production of Carousel in 2016.

As an educator, Tommy began his career teaching ballet and modern dance while performing as a company member with Ballet Memphis in Tennessee. After moving to Chicago to join The Joffrey Ballet in 2003, he continued that educational work within his artistic home, sharing his movement training with the artistic ensemble while being heavily involved with The House's educational outreach initiatives. He began teaching dance and physical theatre at NU through The Actors Gymnasium in Evanston and was subsequently hired as an Adjunct Lecturer beginning in 2012 to teach Movement for Actors in the Department of Theatre. Tommy's pedagogical efforts emphasize personal artistic process, ensemble ethics, physical deftness and specificity, emotional safety alongside emotional vulnerability, and the actor as a collaborative designer of performance. He joined the Acting faculty at NU as a full-time Lecturer in 2018.

RYAN T. NELSON - Ryan T. Nelson is a lecturer in music theatre for the School of Communication at Northwestern University and the music director for Northwestern's Virginia Wadsworth Wirtz Center for the Performing Arts. He also serves as the music supervisor for the American Music Theatre Project (AMTP) and the famed Waa-Mu Show. Ryan is the resident music director at Chicago's Marriott Theatre, where he has music directed dozens of productions, including the world premieres of Hero, Andrew Lloyd Webber: Now and ForeverandFor the Boys. His work on A Chorus Line and The Light in the Piazza at the Marriott has been recognized with Joseph Jefferson Award nominations for excellence in Chicago theatre. Ryan has also conducted and orchestrated productions at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre and the Asolo Repertory Theatre (Sarasota, Florida). He has been on the faculty of Northwestern University for over a decade, formerly as an assistant professor of music in Northwestern University's Bienen School of Music. His master of music and doctor of musical arts degrees in conducting are from the University of North Texas, where he was a student of Eugene Migliaro Corporon.