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Teaching Artist Biographies
WILL CHANDLER, an American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) Nicholl Fellowship screenwriter, is the YAWP Program Director and a teaching artist. He was formerly the Education Director for Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor where he taught, administered and expanded the theatre's education programs. He has sold scripts and worked on assignment for a number of studios and independent producers, including Sony Pictures and actor Russell Crowe. He has also been a story analyst/script doctor for CBS, Viacom, Harpo Productions, New World Pictures and private clients. As Director of Development for Green-Epstein Productions, Chandler worked on dozens of projects for ABC, CBS, NBC and HBO.
EMMA WALTON HAMILTON is a theater professional and arts educator, as well as a best-selling author and editor. Currently, Walton Hamilton is the YAWP Executive Director and a Director/Creator of Stony Brook Southampton's Summer Playwriting Conference. As a co-founder of Bay Street, she served as the Theatre's Co-Artistic Director for thirteen years. Until 2008 she was Director of Education and Programming for Young Audiences, and spearheaded the Young Playwrights Program in area schools, as well as Kidstreet, the Theatre's performance series for young audiences. Walton Hamilton has written 16 children's books in partnership with her mother, actress Julie Andrews, and serves as Editorial Director for The Julie Andrews Collection publishing program. Her latest book, a solo venture, is entitled Raising Bookworms: Getting Kids Reading for Pleasure and Empowerment.
MAGDALENE BRANDEIS has just completed her first novel, BOX. In previous lives, she translated and adapted several French films, produced multiple seasons of Movies At Our House for AMC, and was associate producer of the Bravo series Citizen Reno. She wrote and directed the one-act Saphho's Choice for the Zeitgeist Theater Company in Los Angeles. As a member of an experimental theater troupe in Paris, Atelier Robert Cordier, she performed in various bilingual productions of Shakespeare's plays. She was also the executive director of The Bridge Program: Community Humanities Education, which offered an accredited course in the humanities to low-income adults. Ms. Brandeis is a recent graduate of the MFA Program in Writing and Literature at Stony Brook Southampton and a member of the Ashawagh Hall Writers Workshop. Her work has appeared in The East Hampton Star and The Southampton Review. She lives on Shelter Island with her husband Jon.
WILLIAM BURFORD's "legit" career as a stage director eventually brought him to Sag Harbor, where he served as producer and general manager for Bay Street Theatre. He taught playwriting for the Southampton Writers Conference in 2008 and has directed for other nationally recognized play development venues, including the Preston Jones, Stages Repertory, Edward Albee and New Harmony programs. Director and instructor at Stony Brook's West Campus since 2004, he now teaches theater and collaborates on creativity, sustainability and the arts at Southampton. Bill just joined the MFA Writing & Literature staff to help produce its playwriting initiatives. His honors BA in philosophy at UT Austin was followed by an MFA in directing and a thesis on eastern European political comedy.
NICK FONDULIS earned his BFA in Acting from Syracuse University. Currently he plays a recurring character in the upcoming NBC drama Kings and in the improv experiences Accomplice: New York and Accomplice: The Village. Recently Fondulis played the role of The Narrator/Elroy Eisner in The Boy in the Basement at the SoHo Playhouse and The Barrow Street Theatre. Other Off-Broadway credits: originating the role of Guildencrantz in the Shakespeare spoof, A Bard's Day's Night('s Dream), performing at The Laugh Factory with their official improv troupe, and playing the title role of Huck Finn at the Metropolitan Playhouse. Fondulis has directed An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein at the Sutton Pavilion, Finding the Wonder at The Bad Plays Festival, Roomies in The Shotgun Theater Festival at the Gene Frankel Theater and Behind the Scenes for the Bay Street Theatre Young Playwrights Program. He has also studied acting with Alec Baldwin and Michael Disher, trained at Shakespeare's Globe Theater in London and studied playwriting with Gerardine Clark.
NAIMY HACKETT lived in Italy for 30 years, where she worked as a musician, hosted her own radio program for RadioMontecarlo, and produced more than 200 songs tunes as a lyricist. Her teaching experience includes extensive vocal coaching, songwriting and movement lessons for professional artists. A native of East Hampton, she has directed and choreographed and stage managed performances at East Hampton's Guild Hall, performed at Robert Wilson's Watermill Center, and co-wrote "Nasty Girl" with Destiny's Child on their "Survivor" LP. She has been a teaching artist and director for Bay Street Theatre's Young Playwrights Program for the past three years.
ANNETTE HANDLEY CHANDLER has produced many projects for PBS, ABC, The Disney Channel, CBS and NBC, among them the critically acclaimed Ansel Adams: A Documentary, with filmmaker Ric Burns, and Our Sons, starring Hugh Grant and Julie Andrews. Chandler recently wrote, directed and produced Plum TV's documentary on local vintner/sculptor Walter Channing. Chandler taught Story Analysis/Screenwriting at UCLA to movie executives and now teaches in Bay Street Theatre's Young Playwrights Program. Chandler is also the Director of the inaugural Southampton Screenwriting Conference.
KRISTEN LOWMAN is an actress who began her career with John Houseman's The Acting Company. Over the years she has worked in TV, film and theatre. Some of her many theatre experiences were with the South Coast Repertory, La Jolla Playhouse, the Old Globe, Pasadena Playhouse, Cleveland Play House, the Barter, GeVa as well as a national tour, the Kennedy Center, and Broadway. After eaching drama to children in Maui in 1999, she founded The Children's Theatre Workshop in Los Angeles, which she ran until 2004. As a teacher with the East Los Angeles Classic theatre, she taught young playwrights in many of the public schools in East LA and San Bernardino.
CATHY MORIARTY made her feature film debut at 18 in Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull, opposite Robert De Niro, a role that earned her a BAFTA nomination, two Golden Globe nominations and an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress. Other film appearances include Kindergarten Cop, Soapdish, Matinee, The Gun In Betty Lou's Handbag, Another Stakeout, Steven Spielberg's Casper, and Forget Paris, directed by Billy Crystal. In 1995, Moriarty co-starred in the CBS TV series Bless This House, and also appeared in Seance, an episode for HBO's Tales from the Crypt, winning a CableAce Award. Cathy has been a teaching artist with Bay Street Theatre's Young Playwrights Program.
KATE MUETH is an Equity Union member who has worked as an actress, director and choreographer in theatre, television and independent films. Recent stage work: Germaine in Guild Hall's production of Steve Martin's Picasso at the Lapin Agile, portraying Molly Bloom in In the Room With Molly Bloom at the Manhattan Theatre Source in NYC, and at Robert Wilson's Watermill Center (Residency Fellowship), The "Stage Manager” role in Orson Welles' Moby Dick Rehearsed starring Peter Boyle and directed by Academy and Tony award winner Tony Walton, and Miss B. in Enter Laughing (with Eli Wallach, dir: Lew Stadlin). For a night honoring Joe Pintauro, she directed a fully designed reading of his Beside Herself at Guild Hall and has directed play readings for the Neighborhood Playhouse, The Children's Museum of the East End, Bay Street Theater's YPP, and Guild Hall. She is a theatre and movement teaching artist (New York State Council on the Arts, Ross School, and Guild Hall) and voiceover artist. Kate will be reviving her direction of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged this summer and staging, in rep, A.R. Gurney's Sylvia at Mulford Farm in East Hampton. Kate is now in rehearsals choreographing Wody Girtch Mama, a dance theater piece showing at The Ross School in spring, 2009.
CHUCK NOVATKA has a BA in acting and is pursuing his Masters Degree in Education from Dowling College. As an actor he has performed in numerous regional theatres in both musical and non-musical theatre. He taught children's acting classes through Danse Arts in Bridgehampton, created a children's theatre workshop for the Sag Harbor Afterschool Program, and served as a special education teacher for Sag Harbor Elementary School. Chuck was a lead teaching artist with the Bay Street Theatre Young Playwrights Program. Last year he wrote and produced two one-man shows, Water Under the Fridge and Scrambled Eggs (which was selected to The Emerging Artists One-Man Standing Festival). Chuck also serves on the selection committee for the Summer Play Festival (SPF) at the Public Theatre in NYC.
JULIE SHEEHAN is a 2008 recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and author of two poetry collections: Orient Point, which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Thaw, winner of the Poets Out Loud prize from Fordham University. Other honors include the Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award from Southwest Review, the Robert H. Winner prize from Poetry Society of America, and, from Paris Review, the Bernard F. Conners prize. Her poems have appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Parnassus, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Yale Review, The Best American Poetry and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and the forthcoming anthologies Seriously Funny: Poems About Love, God, War, Art, Sex, Madness, and Everything Else, ed. Barbara Hamby and David Kirby, University of Georgia Press, and Poem in Your Pocket, ed. Elaine Bleakney, introd. by Kay Ryan, Harry N. Abrams. Her third collection, Bar Book: Poems & Otherwise, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.
LOU ANN WALKER, editor of The Southampton Review, is a writer-in-residence and lecturer in the MFA Program in Writing and Literature at Stony Brook Southampton. She is also a screenwriter and journalist and has written for many publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, Parade, People, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Esquire. She's the author of a number of books, including the memoir, A Loss for Words, winner of the Christopher Award and a Book of the Month Club Editor's Choice, as well as a book on artist Roy Lichtenstein. Other awards include a Marguerite Higgins Distinguished Reporting Award, a New York Public Library Books of the Year, a National Social Studies Book Council Books of the Year Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Grant. She previously taught at Columbia and Marymount Manhattan College.