Linda Apperson

Lecturer, Production Stage Management. Linda Apperson received a B.A. in Theatre from Florida State University and has been a stage manager for more than 30 years. Locally, she has stage managed for TheatreWorks, West Bay Opera, Peninsula Youth Theatre, Pear Avenue Theatre, San Jose Civic Light Opera, San Jose Repertory Theatre and Foothill Summer Theater.  She has also stage managed several productions for the American Alliance of Performing Arts Educators at Lincoln Center, Caldwell Playhouse in Boca Raton, Florida and Colorado Music Hall in Denver.  Linda is the author of Stage Management and Theatre Etiquette.

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Jeffrey Bihr

Lecturer, Drama. Jeffrey Bihr has worked as an actor, director, composer and educator for the last twenty-five years. He was a company member for seven seasons at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre and has been a member of the International Acting Company of Tadashi Suzuki since 1987. He was a founding member of Anne Bogart’s SITI company, and has spent seven years on the core faculty of the MFA Program at ACT. Recently, Bihr directed The Lover at Stanford, Gown for his Mistress, a Feydeau farce, and Deep Sea Diving in Los Angeles. Other credits include The Misanthrope in Münster, Germany, and The Greeks in London. In addition, he has composed numerous play and film scores. Bihr has won numerous awards including Bay Area Critics Circle and Dramalogue awards for acting and directing, and CINDY award for film composition.

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Kristine Elliott

Lecturer, Ballet. Following a professional career of fifteen years as a company member of American Ballet Theatre and the Stuttgart Ballet, Kristine Elliott now dedicates herself to teaching, coaching, and mentoring aspiring dancers.

As Director of Ballet in the Dance Division of the Department of Drama, Kristine teaches classical ballet at all levels, in addition to coaching students in both repertory and performance. From 2000-2003, she served as Faculty Adviser to the Cardinal Ballet, culminating with a performance of George Balanchine’s “The Four Temperaments,” courtesy of the Balanchine Trust, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Balanchine’s birth.

With support from Stanford University, Kristine has traveled to South Africa for three consecutive years to teach ballet and conduct research in Johannesburg and the townships of Cape Town. Through her work with the Dance For All program in Guguletu, near Cape Town, she has discovered how the study of ballet can change the lives of children from the most impoverished communities. Her work has also been supported by grants from the Flora Foundation and many private individuals.

During her dancing career, Elliott worked with luminaries such as Rudolph Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Natalia Markova, Fernando Bujones, and George Balanchine; performed in the original casts of choreographies by Twyla Tharp, Antony Tudor, and Jiri Kylian; danced principal roles in Giselle, Coppélia, The Nutcracker, Raymonda, Theme and Variations, and Miss Julie; and performed in film and television.

Since 1990, Kristine has been a guest teacher for company class at American Ballet Theatre in New York and San Francisco. She has been a guest teacher since 1996 at Ballet Theatre’s Summer Intensive Workshop in New York City, where she teaches advanced ballet technique and repertory to selected students. In 2004, she expanded her summer guest teaching schedule to include the Extreme Ballet Program at Kaatsbaan International Dance Center in Tivoli, New York.

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Erik Flatmo

Lecturer, Set Design. Erik Flatmo teaches set design in the Department of Drama and continues to work professionally as a set designer based in San Francisco. Prior to joining Stanford, he taught at Barnard College in New York City for three years where he also worked on theatre and dance projects ranging from Off-Broadway to Broadway and the Metropolitan Opera.

His professional focus is on original plays and dance pieces, and he has designed premiere productions of plays by emerging playwrights Julia Jordan, Brooke Berman, Gary Sunshine, Zakiyyah Alexander, and Anne Washburn. Locally, he has collaborated extensively with the director/playwright John Fisher, currently artistic director of San Francisco’s Theatre Rhinoceros. Upcoming work includes projects at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre, San Francisco Opera Center and Joe Goode Dance Company.

Flatmo received a B.A. in Architecture from Columbia University and an M.F.A in Design from the Yale School of Drama. He was born and raised in Palo Alto.
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Diane Frank

Lecturer, Modern Dance, Merce Cunningham Technique, Choreography. After completing a B.F.A in Theater (Ohio University) and an M.A. in Dance (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana), Diane Frank taught for four years in the Dance Department at the University of Maryland, where she was a founding member of the Maryland Dance Theater. She then moved to New York City to begin an eleven-year career with Douglas Dunn and Dancers, touring nationally and internationally. As a scholarship student, she was invited by Merce Cunningham to join the teaching staff of the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio, where she taught for eight years. At Cunningham’s request, she taught both technique and repertory at the American Center’s Atelier Cunningham in Paris. A frequent guest teacher at the Paris Opera, she assisted Douglas Dunn in both the creation of new work for the Opera and the setting of established repertory. Frank has been the recipient of seven NEA Choreography Fellowships for collaborative choreographic projects with Deborah Riley, as well as commissions from the Jerome Foundation, DTW, Dance Bay Area, and Meet the Composer, and Arts Silicon Valley. Her work has been performed both in the United States and abroad.
At Stanford since 1988, Frank teaches intermediate and advanced modern technique, choreography, and mentors graduate and undergraduate student dance projects. She organizes and advises Stanford’s student participation in the American College Dance Festival as well as other Divisional dance education and performance projects on- and off-campus. She is the Co-Director of the Dance Division's annual concert. She also organizes numerous choreographic commissions by guest artists for Stanford student dancers, frequently acting as Rehearsal Director, setting and maintaining works by choreographers as diverse as Elizabeth Streb, Holly Johnston, Brenda Way, Parijat Desai, Hope Mohr, Janice Garrett, among others. In 2005, she played a significant role in the development of Stanford Lively Arts’ campus-wide interdisciplinary arts event “Encounter: Merce,” organizing its “Music and Dance by Chance” commissions, as well as an IHUM lecture series on Cunningham’s video dances and concert repertory. She has twice taught Cunningham repertory in Stanford workshop classes.
Frank has been instrumental in developing a number of residency projects and artistic collaborations for the Dance Division. Highlights include: the repertory reconstruction project of Anna Halprin’s "Myths"; Hope Mohr's "Under the skin," a collaborative performance project bringing together artists, physicians and residents from the Medical School, and community performers; Elizabeth Streb's "Crash" performed with Streb's company on Stanford's Memorial Auditorium stage; and "Cantor:Rewired," site-specific outdoor iterations of Parijat Desai's work fusing Southeast Asian classical Indian dance with post-Modern choreographic strategies. Originally performed throughout the galleries and grounds of Stanford's Cantor Arts Center, this work was most recently performed at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum in May 2010. in Spring 2010, she assisted Ann Carlson in the organization of her walking performance event, "Still Life with Decoy". In 2011, she is assisting in the reconstruction of Anna Sokolow's signature masterpiece, "Rooms". Frank also teaches “The Duets Project,” a performance class that examines partnering through duet repertory. Strongly interested in site-specific performance, Frank has taught the theory course “Figure/Ground: Site-Specific Dance Performance in Outdoor Environments.” Complementing this course, she conceived and organized "Red Rover," a series of commissioned site-specific dance performances traveling the grounds of Stanford campus. Frank instituted and currently directs the Firework Series, a quarterly informal showing of student work followed by discussion among artists and audience. She also conceived and organized the Bay Area Dance Exchange, a day-long intensive hosted by Stanford for Bay Area college and university dance programs; eight schools gather to share studio practices, creative processes, and performances of works. Frank's recent choreography includes the site-specific duet "Cleave," from which she developed a video dance with film maker David Alvarado, as well as "Sea Change," a series of duets. Her current work, "Twilight Composite" will be performed at the American College Dance Festival in March 2012. Frank is a frequent guest teacher at Bay Area dance studios, colleges, and universities. A strong proponent of arts education, she consults and volunteers in the development of dance and live arts activities for public schools and the community. She has also directed the Dance Division’s summer dance intensive for high school students through US Performing Arts. Frank is Acting Director of the Dance Division for the Academic Year 2011-12.

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Aleta Hayes

Lecturer, Contemporary Dance and Performance. Aleta Hayes is a contemporary dancer, choreographer, performer, and teacher. Before her appointment at Stanford, Ms. Hayes taught for eight years at Princeton University in the Program in Theater and Dance and the Program in African American Studies. While at Princeton, Ms. Hayes developed pedagogically innovative courses that combined cultural and performance history, theory, and performance. She has also taught at Wesleyan University, Swarthmore College, and Rutgers University. Ms. Hayes holds an M.F.A. in Dance and Choreography from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and a B.A., with Departmental Honors, in Drama, Dance and the Visual Arts from Stanford University (1991). 
Aleta Hayes lived and worked in New York City for fifteen years, choreographing solo and group dance pieces, in which her performances often interpolated acting and singing. Highlights include: Hatsheput, presented at the Place Theater, London and St. Marks Church, New York; Tarantantara, presented at Jacob’s Pillow; and La Chanteuse Nubienne (written by playwright Daniel Alexander Jones), performed for Movement Research at Judson Church. Ms. Hayes collaborated, as choreographer and dance/vocal soloist, with the poet Yusef Komunyakaa and composer William Banfield, on Ish-Scoodah, a chamber opera with dance about the nineteenth century African American sculptor, Edmonia Lewis. She also had leading roles in major works by other artists such as Jane Comfort (the trip-hop dance/opera Asphalt, with a book by Carl Hancock Rux) and Robert Wilson (the opera The Temptation of St Anthony, with gospel and other African American spiritual music forms and libretto by Bernice Johnson Reagon). Ms. Hayes has continued to perform in the subsequent international presentations of The Temptation of St Anthony. 
In 2004, Ms. Hayes returned to Stanford on a Ford Foundation Resident Dialogues Fellowship through the Committee on Black Performing Arts, for which she created The Wedding Project, a performance piece of multiple genres illustrating the evolution of American social dance through the narrative of African American wedding traditions. She extended this "theater of mixed forms" (the critic Anna Kisselgoff’s term) into community dialogue when she was a 2005 Peninsula Community Foundation Artist-in-Residence at Eastside Preparatory School in East Palo Alto. That residence culminated in The ReMix Project, where she collaborated with students to create and perform a montage of music, monologue, and movement examining student aspirations in a low-income, racially-mixed neighborhood. 
Since 2005, Ms. Hayes has had many leading roles as a dancer, singer and actor including, most notably: Suzan-Lori Park’s In the Blood, directed by Prof. Harry Elam, (2005): In the spring of 2006, she choreographed, danced, spoke, and sang a multimedia solo piece, Deianeira (an adoption of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis) created for Ms. Hayes and directed by Drama and Classics Professor Rush Rehm: She created a solo piece, Califia, which developed out of an residency at the Djerassi Resident Artist Program (2007), and a Stanford Humanities Lab Grant/Fellowship (2006) in collaboration with CCRMA-Center for Computer Music and Acoustics (involving human computer interaction): She wrote, sang, acted, and co-directed an original work in the Stanford Drama Department based on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land titled, The Waste Land in Black and White (2009).
The Chocolate Heads Movement Band, founded by Hayes in 2009 to the present, is a platform for performers of many genres. The troupe’s name is a descriptor for a “movement driven band” comprised of dancers, musicians, visual artists, performance poets and writers—referencing both dance and social movement as motivating forces for the work. In 2011, the Chocolate Heads were invited to perform at STAN: Society, Technology, Art and Nature—a prototype TED X talk at Stanford University.
Hayes’ latest dance-music performance installation, ‘Singing the Rooms-Performance of the Everyday’, is a collaboration with New York based composer, performer and multi-instrumentalist, Cooper Moore—a dramatic song cycle to be performed by her and collaborators in different domesticated spaces.

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Dan Klein

Lecturer, Improvisation.Dan Klein has returned to Stanford to teach Improvisational Theater and to direct the Stanford Improvisors. As an undergraduate at Stanford, he was a founding member of the SImps and perennial TA for Patricia Ryan Madson, his predecessor. After graduating, Klein joined the performing company BATS Improv in San Francisco, where he also coached and served as Dean of the BATS Improv School. As a renegade improv teacher, Klein has had appointments at the American Conservatory Theater, the Academy of Art University, the Berkeley Repertory Theater, Dominican University, Vector Conservatory, Menlo School, and has taught corporate workshops for clients like Visa, Cisco, Sun, Oracle, Schwab, Kaiser, Clorox, Cadence, Clif Bar, and others. He is also a member of the Kasper Hauser Comedy Group, authors of SkyMaul, the in-flight catalog parody.

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Kay Kostopoulos

Lecturer, Acting. Kay Kostopoulos directs and teaches acting, musical theatre, acting pedagogy, voice, speech, and Shakespeare in the Department of Theatre and Continuing Studies Program at Stanford University. She also teaches “Acting with Power” at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Kay has created and directed training programs for Stanford’s School of Medicine and co-teaches a program for their Symbolic Systems Department in the development of facial recognition for the treatment of autism. She has taught seminars for Stanford’s Executive Program for Women and Women in Entrepreneurship Program, Stanford’s Global Management Project, Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Studies, Lippencott Brand Strategy, Fripp and Associates, Genetech, Cisco Systems, Stand and Deliver Consulting, The National Association of Speakers, Capital City Young Writers Conference, and eBay’s Global Women’s Conference. Her work has been featured in “O” (Oprah) Magazine.

Kay has acted in many Bay Area and regional theaters, including A.C.T., the Magic Theatre, the San Francisco and California Shakespeare Festivals, and five seasons of Stanford Summer Theatre. Favorite roles have included Cleopatra, Medea, Major Barbara, Goneril in King Lear, Dionysia in Pericles, as well asAnne Sexton in The Psychic Life of Savages, and Berinthia in Restoration Comedy, bothby Stanford colleague, Amy Freed. She has additional credits in voiceover, film, and television and performs throughout the Bay Area with her critically acclaimed music ensemble, Black Olive Jazz.

Kay is an MFA graduate of American Conservatory Theatre, where she taught acting and directed student projects as a core faculty member of A.C.T.’s Advanced Training Program. She has taught “Acting for Teachers” at Dominican University and acting and directing at City College of San Francisco, Vector Theatre Conservatory, American Musical Theatre of San Jose, and DeAnza College. She served as Education Director at The California Shakespeare Festival. At Stanford, Kay performed the voices of Athena, Penelope, Circe, Calypso, and Helen in “Encountering Homer’s Odyssey,” an online classics program through the Stanford/Princeton/Yale Alliance. She has directed and performed in educational projects for Stanford’s Lively Arts, Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts (SICA), Stanford’s Continuing Studies Symposia, including the Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, William Saroyan, and Charles Darwin Centennials.

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Richard Powers

Lecturer, Social dance forms of North America. Richard Powers is one of the world’s foremost experts in American social dance, noted for his choreographies for dozens of stage productions and films, and his workshops in Paris, Rome, Prague, London, Venice, Geneva, St. Petersburg, and Tokyo as well as across the United States and Canada. He has been researching and reconstructing historic social dances for thirty years and is currently a full-time instructor at Stanford’s Dance Division.

Powers was selected by the Centennial Issue of Stanford Magazine as one of Stanford University’s most notable graduates of its first century. In 1999 he was awarded the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for distinctive and exceptional contributions to education at Stanford University.

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Connie Strayer

Senior Lecturer, Costume Design, Textiles, Theatrical Makeup. Connie Strayer’s costume designs have been seen on local stages of Opera San Jose, West Bay Opera, TheatreWorks (where she was nominated for a Bay Area Theatre Critic’s Circle Award) as well as the Stanford Summer Theater, where she has recently designed Amy Freed’s Restoration Comedy and Harold Pinter’s The Lover, among others. Related areas include working as a make-up artist for the San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Ballet, fashion, and film. For the past twenty years, she has been studying the art of dyeing, and has utilized her skills for the pre-Broadway production of Martin Guerre for The Guthrie Theatre; Firebird, Carnival of Animals, and Fifth Element for the San Francisco Ballet; Medea for Smuin Ballet; and other works for Alonzo King’s Lines Ballet, San Diego Opera, Ballet San Jose, and The Singapore Dance Company. She also designs and produces hand-painted yardage for the fashion arena. She is a member of the Theatrical Designer’s Union, USAA Local #829.

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Susan Cashion

Senior Lecturer Emerita, Mexican Dance, Latin American Dance. Susan Cashion received her Ph.D. in Education (Stanford University, 1983), M.A. in Anthropology (Stanford University, 1982), and M.A. in Dance (UCLA, 1967). She joined the Dance faculty in 1972 and is a teacher of dance anthropology, modern dance, Mexican dance, and Latin American dance forms at Stanford.

Cashion was the Coordinator of the Dance Division from June 1987 to September 2002. She was the recipient of two Fulbright grants (one to Mexico and one to Chile), an American Association of University Women Fellowship, and received recognition from the Mexican government for contributions to Mexican culture and folklore in the United States. Cashion is the former President of the California Dance Educators Association, member of the Board of Directors for Congress on Research in Dance, and Artistic Director of the Grupo Folklórico Los Lupeños de San Jose.
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Patricia Ryan Madson

Senior Lecturer Emerita, Improvisation.Patricia Ryan Madson was the 1998 winner of the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for Outstanding Innovation in Undergraduate Education. She was on the faculty in the Drama Department at Stanford University from 1977 until 2005. She has served as the head of the Undergraduate Acting Program. Founder and coach of the Stanford Improvisors, she taught beginning and advanced level courses in improvisation for undergraduates as well as adults in Stanford’s Continuing Studies Program. In 1996 she founded the Creativity Initiative at Stanford, an interdisciplinary alliance of faculty who shared the belief that creativity can be taught.

Ryan Madson has taught “Design Improv” for the School of Engineering and was a Guest Lecturer for Engineering 145, Stanford Technology Ventures Program. She teaches regularly for the Esalen Institute, and has given workshops for Sun Microsystems Japan Division, the California Institute for Integral Studies, the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, the National Association of Drama Therapists, the Western Psychological Association, Duke University East Asian Studies Center, and the Meaningful Life Therapy Association in Japan. Ryan Madson combines her work in improvisation with work as a counselor using an Eastern approach to problem solving known as Constructive Living. Dr. David K. Reynolds certified her as a Constructive Living Instructor in 1987 at the Health Center Pacific on Maui. Additionally, she has been the American Coordinator of the Oomoto School of Traditional Japanese Arts in Kameoka, Japan. There she has studied tea ceremony and calligraphy.

Ryan Madson’s published writings include a chapter on constructive living in the 1995 anthology Mindfulness and Meaningful Work, edited by Claude Whitmyer (Parallex Press), as well as chapters in the SUNY Press books Plunging Through the Clouds and Flowing Bridges, Quiet Waters. Her first book, Improv Wisdom: Don’t Prepare, Just Show Up was published by Random House (Bell Tower) in 2005, and named “One of the Best Spiritual Books of 2005” by Spirituality and Health.

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