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Florida State / School of Theatre / People / Faculty
Faculty
Administration
Cameron Jackson
Professor Jackson, who serves as the School's Executive Director and Producing Artistic Director, holds a BFA in Acting from New York University and an MFA in Stage Management from University of Alabama. Cameron has taught at Mars Hill College, University of Tennessee, Arizona State University and most recently was a founding Director of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland. Cameron has worked at the Virginia Stage Company, the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, the Southern Appalachian Repertory Theatre, the Folger Shakespeare Library, The Promenade Theatre, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Manhattan Theatre Club, the Clarence Brown Theatre, LaMaMa ETC, the Performing Arts Center at SUNY Purchase, the Minetta Lane, the Clurman, the Lion, Circle Rep., the Beckett, New York Theater Workshop, Riverside Players, City Hall, Ruth Eckerd Hall, Sun Valley Rep, and the Perry Street Theatre. To read more about Cameron Jackson, click here.
T. Lynn Hogan
T. Lynn Hogan is an Associate Dean for the College of Visual Arts, Theatre and Dance and a faculty member in the School of Theatre. He holds a Ph.D. in higher education administration from Bowling Green State University. To read more about Lynn Hogan, click here.
Design / Production / Management
Robert H. Coleman
Robert H. Coleman has contributed to well over three hundred Dance, Opera, and Dramatic Theatre productions in a wide variety of venues. Until 2001, he was Director of Production at the Opera Festival of New Jersey at McCarter Theatre in Princeton NJ. During his tenure, the Opera Festival presented several world premieres and was considered by Opera News and Money magazine to be among the top ten summer festivals in the U.S and in the top twenty worldwide. To read more about Robert Coleman, click here.
Martha H. Cooper
Martha H. Cooper is a tenured Associate Professor of Costume Technology at FSU. A theatrical costumer for over 30 years, Martha has worked as a designer, draper, and shop manager at many professional theatres including Seaside Music Theatre, Utah Shakespearean Festival, Berkshire Theatre Festival, New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, Peach State Summer Theatre, Jekyll Island Summer Music Theatre Festival and Tennessee Repertory Theatre. To read more about Martha Cooper, click here.
Colleen Muscha
Colleen Muscha holds a named professorship as the Don Stowell, Jr. Professor of Costume Design and heads the MFA Costume Design program at FSU. She has designed costumes professionally at numerous regional theatres including the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, Utah Shakespearean and the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Cleveland Playhouse, Penn Centre Stage, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and Asolo Theatre Company. Her New York City design credits include work at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, Equity Library Theatre and Longacre Theatre. Among the shows she has designed, include King Lear, Tempest, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Werther, The Importance of Being Earnest, Antigone, The Pirates of Penzance, The Physicists, Man of La Mancha and Sweeney Todd. To read more about Colleen Muscha, click here.
Dale Jordan
Dale F. Jordan is a professor in the Design Area of the School of Theatre. Mr. Jordan has designed for many Regional Theatres such as Geva Theatre, Arena Stage, Studio Arena, San Diego Rep, San Jose Rep, Geffen Playhouse, Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, Huntington Theatre, Meadow Brook Theatre, Coconut Grove Playhouse, Cleveland Playhouse, Alley Theatre, Denver Center Theatre Company, Denver Civic Theatre, Tennessee Rep, Stage West, Asolo Theatre, Crossroads Theatre, Queens Theatre In The Park, Olney Theatre, Barter Theatre, Delaware Theatre, Long Island Stage Company, Capital Rep, Playmakers Rep, Arkansas Rep, Merrimack Rep, Portland Stage Company, Northlight Theatre, Peterborough Players, Clarence Brown Theatre, Florida Rep, Theatre Works, The American Place Theatre, Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Whole Theatre, The New Federal Theatre, The Lambs Theatre, Soho Rep, American Stage, Weston Playhouse, Berkshire Theatre Festival and Williamstown Theatre Festival. To learn more about Dale, click here.
Andrew Becker
Andrew Becker (Visiting Assistant Professor of MFA Technical Production) is returning to Tallahassee after earning his BFA in Theatre Design & Technology from Florida State University in 2007. While attending FSU, he held management positions in several notable summer theatre companies including Des Moines Metro Opera, and the Utah Shakespearean Festival. To learn more about Andrew, click here.
Susan Thomas
Susan Thomas (Head of Theatre Management/Director of Communications) is an educator and arts administrator. For the past 11 years she taught in and directed the Arts Management program at Miami University in Ohio, a joint program between the university’s School of Fine Arts and the Farmer School of Business. In addition, she handled marketing and communications efforts for the School of Fine Arts, including web, print and social media. Previously, she was the Marketing Director for Lexington Children’s Theatre in Kentucky. She holds an M.A. in Theatre Arts from the University of Kentucky. To learn more about Susan, click here.
Performance
Fred Chappell
Fred Chappell, (Professor, Directing, Head MFA Directing) is the head of the MFA Directing Program and former Artistic Director of the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta. He was also the Artistic Director of North Carolina's The Lost Colony for twelve years. He has directed regionally at such theatres as the Kennedy Center, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, the Walnut Street Theatre and A.C.T. in Seattle. To read more about Fred Chappell, click here.
Kate Gelabert
Kate Watson Gelabert (Music Theatre and Movement) is an Associate Professor and Head of the BFA Music Theatre Program. She has choreographed the majority of musicals presented in the Fallon, Lab and Studio theatres since 1981 as well as several works produced by the College of Music and the Department of Dance here at FSU. To read more about Kate Gelabert, click here.
Debra Hale
Debra Hale is an Associate Professor on the Performance Faculty in the School of Theatre teaching Voice, Speech and Dialects in the BFA Acting Program. She holds a BS in Education from Indiana University and an MFA in Acting from California Institute of the Arts. She began acting in Shakespeare in Central Park, Louisville by playing Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, Bianca in Taming of the Shrew, Marina in Pericles, Mrs. Ford in Merry Wives of Windsor and Hermione in A Winter’s Tale. She is a member of Actors Equity and SAG and has worked as an actress in Los Angeles in several theatres as well as in a national commercial for Sears. She played Andrea in Andrea’s Got Two Boyfriends, which won the Drama Critics Circle award for Ensemble Performance, and ran for two years, touring the west coast. To read more about Debra Hale, click here.
Jean McDaniel Lickson
Jean McDaniel Lickson is an Associate Professor of Acting & Movement and is Head of the BFA Acting Program. She received her MFA in Acting from The FSU/Asolo Conservatory and is a Certified Advanced Yoga Teacher with the American Viniyoga Institute. Jean has performed with American Stage, the Asolo State Theatre, the New York Theatre Ensemble, Pennsylvania Centre Stage, the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, Showboat Theatre, Oklahoma Theatre Center, the Southern Shakespeare Festival, and Theatre Southeast. Jean was the recipient of the University Teaching Incentive Program Award and has twice received the University Teaching Award. She is a member of the Actors Equity Association and the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists.
Thomas Ossowski
Tom Ossowski (Assistant Professor, Director, Music Director) teaches in the BFA Music Theatre Program and is Artistic Director for the Post Playhouse in Chadron, Nebraska. Tom has also directed for theatres such as the Centennial Theater Festival in Connecticut, Seaside Music Theatre in Daytona Beach Florida, The Lost Colony in Manteo, North Carolina and the Bigfork Musical Theatre in Montana. His work has also taken him to Zug, Switzerland and St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. To read more about Tom Ossowski, click here.
Leslie France-Patterson
A professional actor and a highly regarded acting teacher, Leslie France-Patterson has worked in film, television, and theater for more than fifteen years. She starred in the Echelon Pictures theatrical release Confession of a Florist where her "soulful performance" (Variety) garnered rave reviews. To read more about Leslie France-Patterson, click here.
Kris Salata
Kris Salata (joint Ph.D. in Drama and the Humanities, Stanford University) is an artist-scholar and Associate Professor in Performance and a co-head of the BA Program at the School of Theatre. He teaches stage directing, performance, and theory courses in the BA, MA, MFA, and Ph.D. programs. He focuses his research on phenomenological, ontological, and epistemological aspects of theatre practice with emphasis on Performance as Research. He has published articles and book chapters on Konstantin Stanislavsky, Jerzy Grotowski (most recently guest-edited a special issue of TDR dedicated to Grotowski), and the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, Pontedera, Italy.
Scott Hudson
Scott Hudson (Visiting Professor in Theatre Studies) holds an MFA in Acting from Rutgers University and a BFA in Acting from FSU. He is a member of the LAByrinth Theater Company in New York City where he is an actor, playwright, director and educator. For the past 7 years Scott has been teaching with LAByrinth, providing master classes, workshops and university outreach programs designed to stimulate development of artist communities. In 2009, Scott received Broadway producer Daryl Roth’s Creative Spirit Award in recognition of his talent and promise in the field. To learn more about Scott, click here.
Kathryn Mederos-Syssoyeva
Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva (Visiting Professor in Performance) is a scholar, director, choreographer, actor, and writer. She holds a BA in Theater Studies from SUNY Empire State College and a joint Ph.D. in Drama and Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities from Stanford University. Her dissertation, Meyerhold and Stanislavsky at Povarskaia Street: Art, Money, Politics and the Birth of Laboratory Theatre, is in development as a book for Northwestern UP; concurrently, she is editing a volume of essays on collective creation and devising. She has taught classes and workshops in Meyerhold’s Biomechanics and complementary traditions of imagistic/ physical theatre, at Yale School of Drama, Colby College, and Stanford, as well as courses in performance history,drama, film, and gender and queer studies. To learn more about Kathryn click here.
Theatre Studies
Mary Karen Dahl
Mary Karen Dahl (Professor, Theatre Studies; Head of MA/PhD Theatre Studies Program) is Professor of Theatre at Florida State University and Head of the MA and PhD in Theatre Studies. She has a longstanding interest in the relationship between performance and politics. Her book Political Violence in Drama: Classical Models, Contemporary Variations was selected a Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 1987. Related essays include "Postcolonial British Theatre: Black Voices at the Center" inImperialism and Drama (ed. Gainor) for Routledge(1995); "Stage Violence as Thaumaturgic Technique" in Violence in Drama (ed. Redmond) for Cambridge UP (1991); and "State Terror and Dramatic Countermeasures" in Politics and Terror in Modern Drama(eds. Orr and Klaic) for Edinburgh UP (1990).To read more about Mary Karen Dahl, click here.
Elizabeth Osborne
Elizabeth Osborne has a Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park, an M.F.A. in Dramaturgy from Brandeis University, and a B.A. in Theatre from Illinois Wesleyan University. She received the Robert A. Schanke Research Award (2010) for her paper, “Storytelling, Chiggers, and the Bible Belt: The Georgia Experiment as the Public Face of the Federal Theatre Project.” Her research has been published in the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Theatre Symposium, and Theatre History Studies, and her book, Staging the People: Community and Identity in the Federal Theatre Project, will be published as a part of Palgrave’s Theatre and Performance series in the spring of 2011. To read more about Elizabeth Osborne, click here.
Sheri Wilner
Sheri Wilner joins the School of Theatre as a Visiting Professor of Playwriting. Sheri is on the faculty of The Primary Stages Einhorn School of Performing Arts in New York and has also conducted playwriting classes and workshops at University of California, Santa Barbara; Cornell University; University of Minnesota/Guthrie Theater BFA Actor Training Program; and Whitman College. She attended Cornell University and received her MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University. Playwriting awards include a Howard Foundation Fellowship, a Bush Artist Fellowship, two Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellowships and two Heideman Awards, granted by the Actors Theatre of Louisville. To read more about Sheri Wilner, click here.
Isel Rodriguez
Isel Rodríguez (Visiting Professor in Theatre Studies) is a professional actor, performer, scholar and pedagogue. She received her Doctorate in Theatre and Performance of the Americas from Arizona State University, Masters in Theatre Education from NYU, and Bachelors inTheatre Education, from the University of Puerto Rico. Isel specializes in Nation and Nationalism, the performance of national and cultural identities,Latin@ and Latin American theatre and performance, and Puerto Rican theatre and performance in the island and abroad. She is currently co-editing a book, Theatre in Flow: The New Puerto Rican Diaspora that focuses on a new generation of Puerto Rican performance artists, and how their migratory flows, to and from the island, inform their work. To learn more about Isel, click here.
George McConnell
George McConnell (Visiting Professor in Theatre Studies) is currently completing his dissertation, Struck Stupid: 21st CenturyTheatrical Performance and the Limits of a Discourse, from the University of Minnesota. He holds a B.A. in Theatre Performance from Western Michigan University and proudly received his M.A. in Theatre Studies from FSU. His research interests include: contemporary performance art and devised performance, the intersection of performance practice and theory, critical performance pedagogy, performance ethnography and creative research methods. To learn more about George, click here.
