THEATRE DEPARTMENT FACULTY

Elizabeth Carlin Metz

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Craig Choma

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Jeff Grace

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Sherwood Kiraly

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Deana Nichols

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Allison Smith Hahn

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Elizabeth Carlin Metz

Chair, Smith V. Brand Distinguished Professor of Theatre Arts

(309) 341-7306

M.F.A., Temple University, 1983

B.A., Roger Williams University, 1976

Liz’s career includes extensive work in professional theatre, as well as her work in academia. She served as an assistant director at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and was a directing associate at the California Shakespeare Festival. She is the founding artistic director of Chicago’s critically acclaimed Vitalist Theatre, where directing credits include The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol, The Mill on the Floss, King Lear, Anna Karenina, the world premiere of Anung’s First American Christmas, and award winning productions of Mother Courage, A Passage to India, and The Night Season (Vitalist Theatre). Other proud theatre productions include Death and the King’s Horseman, The Sound of Music, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, The Skriker, The Grapes of Wrath, Macbeth, Silent Sky, and In The Next Room among many others. She is an Associate Artist with The International Voices Project (Chicago) where she has directed numerous staged readings of new plays. As a voice director, Liz has worked at Seattle Repertory Theatre, Tacoma Actor’s Guild, and Steppenwolf (Chicago and Off-Broadway) and was in residence for four seasons at Williamstown Theatre Festival. Research interests and publications include acting and voice pedagogy and the intersection of the neuroscience of memory and emotion and acting pedagogy. She teaches acting, directing, dramatic literature, voice and speech, and devised theatre.

Craig is a storyteller, striving to tell stories in unique, fantastical, moving, and wondrous ways. He is a theatrical designer, and his art is the art of making the story visible, meaningful, and resonant with an audience whose understanding of “the visual” is increasingly more sophisticated.

Craig is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Knox Theatre’s resident designer and technical director. Favorite Knox designs include Clyde’s, Silent Sky, The Thanksgiving Play, The How and the Why, The Laramie Project, The Drowning Girls, The Secret in the Wings, Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, Rapture Blister Burn, The Caffe Cino Project, In the Next Room, The Green Bird, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Under Construction, A Lie of the Mind, Euripides’ Medea, Intimate Apparel, The Skriker, The Grapes of Wrath, War and Peace, and Macbeth. Craig has designed both sets and/or lights professionally in Chicago, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Minneapolis, Ohio, Toronto, Canada, and Avignon, France. Craig designs for both theatre and dance, and he enjoys each equally. He has designed in proscenium, thrust, and arena spaces, small storefront theaters, converted churches and libraries, and site-specific spaces. He has been the production designer for a number of fundraising events, and he has collaborated on court cases, creating forensic models to be used in the presentation of evidence. Craig holds a B.A. in Theatre and Philosophy from Knox College (1993), and MFA’s in both Scenic and Lighting Design from Carnegie Mellon University (1996).

Associate Professor of Theatre

(309) 341-7330

schoma@knox.edu

M.F.A., Scenic Design, 1996, Carnegie Mellon University

M.F.A., Lighting Design, 1996, Carnegie Mellon University

B.A., Philosophy & Theatre, 1993, Knox College

View Craig’s Curriculum Vitae

Craig Choma

Jeff Grace

Associate Professor of Theatre

(309) 341-7329

jgrace@knox.edu

www.jeffdgrace.com

Ph.D., Theatre History, Theory, and Literature, 2008, Indiana University

M.S., Education, Curriculum and Instruction, 2004, Indiana University

B.A., Theatre Arts, 1997, Brigham Young University

Jeff is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Knox where he teaches theatre history, dramatic literature, and acting. He received both his M.S. in Education and his Ph.D. in Theatre History from Indiana University. His scholarship on the Caffe Cino intersects themes of sexual identity with social and cultural history in order to examine how topics of gender expression illuminated the visibility of homosexual characters on stage in the 1960s. As a director, Jeff’s work has been seen on stages at Knox College, Indiana University, Brigham Young University, Brighton High Productions, and Street Theatre Jab. Recent directing credits at Knox include The Coast Starlight, The Wolves, Dear Elizabeth, Mrs. Harrison, A Doll’s House, Part 2, The Laramie Project, The Glass Menagerie, The Nether, The Secret in the Wings, Rapture Blister Burn, The Caffe Cino Project, Next Fall, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Under Construction, Medea, and The Serpent.

Deana Nichols is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Knox, where she teaches acting, theatre history, and dramatic literature courses such as Contemporary Plays by Women of Color, Staging the Nation, Latinx Playwrights, and Theatre & Incarceration. At Knox, she has directed The How and the Why, The Thanksgiving Play, The Language Archive, and Clyde’s. Her research focuses on contemporary Scottish theatre, examining the intersection of theatre and political developments between Scotland’s 1997 devolution referendum and its 2014 independence referendum. Her work has been shared in publications such as Theatre/Practice, Theatre History Studies, and the International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen, and at conferences such as the American Society for Theatre Research, the Mid-America Theatre Conference, and the Comparative Drama Conference. Deana is a proud citizen of the Chickasaw Nation.

Assistant Professor of Theatre

dlnichols@knox.edu

Ph.D., Theatre History, Theory, and Literature, Indiana University, 2014

M.A., Theatre History, Theory, and Literature, Indiana University, 2008

B.A., Theatre, Abilene Christian University, 1999

B.A., English Education, Abilene Christian University, 1999

Deana Nichols

Sherwood Kiraly

Professor of Practice

skiraly@knox.edu

B.A., Knox College, 2007

For over a decade Sherwood Kiraly was a newspaper syndicate editor for columnists such as Roger Ebert and the late Ann Landers, and briefly became a TV writer (co-writing an episode of the CBS sitcom “E/R” starring Elliott Gould). He “found his sound” with the critically acclaimed 1990 comic novel California Rush (Macmillan) and followed it with Diminished Capacity and Big Babies (Berkeley). He adapted his fourth novel, Who’s Hot/Who’s Not, into a play, which became a commercial and critical hit for the Laguna Playhouse in California. While writing the “What’s So Funny” column for the Laguna Coastline Pilot (Tribune Co.) from 2002-2009, he adapted Diminished Capacity and Big Babies into screenplays, which went into development. He was on location when Diminished Capacity was shot in New York and New Jersey in 2007 as a co-production of Steppenwolf Films and Plum Pictures, starring Matthew Broderick, Alan Alda, Virginia Madsen, Louis CK, Lois Smith and Bobby Cannavale. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008, kicked off the Gen-Art Festival in New York that year, and was nominated for best picture at Chicago’s Midwest Independent Film Festival. Bought by IFC, it was featured most recently on that channel. He won the Artist of the Year award in Laguna Beach in 2009. Of the critical response to his work, his favorite positive-review phrase was “comically profound,” from the Boston Globe; his favorite left-handed phrase was “entertaining if not edifying” from the New York Times.

Allison is Knox’s resident costume designer and costume studio manager. She studied costume design and artistry here at Knox College under Margo Shively’s mentorship, where she was also a Post-Baccalaureate Fellow (2010-11). Since then Allison has been designing in Chicagoland, which include designs for Multitudes and pool (no water) with Vitalist Theatre. As the resident costume designer for Redtwist Theater’s 2014-2015 season, she designed Good People, The American Clock, Red, I and You, and Another Bone. Her other designs include Rhinoceros (Theatre Heist), Miles Away, Mike and Seth, Hello Failure, and F.X. Kroetz’s Through the Leaves and Request Concert (Side Project Theatre), All Shook Up, How to Succeed in Business […], and You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown (Wilmette Center for the Arts), Next Fall (AstonRep), A 1940s Radio Show (Moon of Hope Studios) and Leading Ladies (Black Hills Playhouse). She teaches Introduction to Costume Design.

Costume Designer Costume Studio Manager

ashahn@knox.edu

B.A., Knox College, 2010