James A. Bell is a theatre scholar, playwright, and dramaturg. He holds a B.A. in theatre arts from Brigham Young University and a Ph.D. in theatre history, theory, and criticism from Florida State University. Before coming to Grand Valley in 2004, he taught and provided production dramaturgy for numerous productions at Jacksonville University, Florida Community College at Jacksonville, and at Florida State University where he was also involved in university theatre administration. He was the 1994 Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival Student Playwriting Award winner for his play Prisoner, which was subsequently performed at the Kennedy Center and has been published by Samuel French. His other plays have been featured at the Mount Sequoyah New Play Retreat and at the Utah Shakespearean Festival in the Plays in Progress Series, as well as the Egyptian Theatre in Park City, Utah. His play, Autumn in the Valley, which was developed at the Utah Shakespearean Festival hadits world premiere production at Grand Valley State University in fall 2006.

Ben Cole has worked in 9 different states as a professional actor, director, and educator. A native to West Michigan, Ben’s first theatrical experience was as an audience member at the Grand Valley Shakespeare Festival. Ben found the production to be so moving that it inspired him to pursue a life in the arts. Locally, Ben was one of the founding members of the Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Acting and Directing from Central Michigan University, and his Master of Fine Arts degree in Acting from Western Illinois University. He is currently assisting Artistic Director, Jim Helsinger, of the Orlando Shakespeare Theatre in writing his book on Shakespeare acting techniques. Most recently, Ben worked with the Oklahoma Shakespearean Festival acting, teaching, and studying with the most decorated Fight Master in the Society of American Fight Directors, Mark Guinn. Other Stage Combat credits for Ben include work at the Orlando Shakespeare Theatre on The Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, and Macbeth, and choreographing the fights for Beauty and the Beast at Park Maitland School in Florida. At Grand Valley State University he is the Visiting Professor of Theatre, and is eager to inspire a new generation of students into a lifelong passion of the arts.

Dr. Roger Ellis earned his Master of Arts degree from the University of Santa Clara, and his doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley. He has trained as an actor in New York, Chicago, and on the west coast; and has spent six seasons with professional repertory and comedy companies as an actor and director. His national directing credits include ALI BABA (Dell'Arte International), LUV (Thuder Bay Rep), DEATHTRAP (Petoskey, Michigan), and others. Locally he has directed and acted for Opera Grand Rapids, Community Circle Theatre, and other groups.He is widely published in the United States and abroad, having written or edited fourteen books on the theatre. In the Great Lakes region, he serves as President of the Theatre Association of Michigan. He frequently offers workshops in acting and auditioning skills, such as his international workshop and adjudication series in 2002 in Canada, France, Switzerland and Germany. At GVSU he founded the Grand Valley Shakespeare Festival in 1993, and the cultural diversity theatre program in 1992. His GVSU stage productions have introduced new work by feminist authors such as Claire Braz-Valentine, Elizabeth Wong, Karen Sunde, and Migdalia Cruz. His recent GVSU stage productions include IDIOT'S DELIGHT, Shakespeare's MEASURE FOR MEASURE and KING HENRY THE FOURTH PART ONE, and A FLEA IN HER EAR.

Jill Hamilton is a costume designer who also serves as the University's theatre facilities manager and coordinator for drama and music activities. She earned her M.A. degree in design from the University of Cincinnati, and worked for a number of years with the Minnesota Dance Theatre designing costumes for regional and national touring companies. In the Great Lakes region she has worked for the Guthrie and Cricket Theatres in Minneapolis, and for Cincinnati's Playhouse in the Park. In West Michigan, she has designed for such groups as Hope College, Grand Rapids’ Circle Theatre, and for corporate/industrial promotional shows. Some of her recent production designs at Grand Valley have included costumes for Guys and Dolls, King Henry the Fourth, part one, Idiot’s Delight, Street Scene, Big Love, Hamlet, Ragtime, Secret Garden, The Servant of Two Masters The Rocky Horror Show, Autumn in the Valley, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Cymbeline, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Candide.

Jack T. Lane is the Box Office and House Manager for the Louis Armstrong Theatre. He has worked in box office management for over 25 years. He has negotiated, booked and managed a national touring Broadway series for over 20 years in Grand Rapids and was a member of the Broadway League and Tony Voter. He earned his BA from Western Michigan University and is continuing his Master’s degree in Public Administration at GVSU. He has served twelve years as a school board member for the Lowell Area Schools and currently is serving on the Lowell Area Arts Council.

Sally Langa is the Costume Shop Manager working for both the Theatre department productions and the Music/Opera productions.  She has worked for Grand Valley State University since 2001. Sally has a degree in drafting from NCTI. Besides constructing costumes for the theatre department Sally has built costumes for GVSU Dance Program, Grand Rapids Ballet, Hope College Dance, Mason Street Warehouse Theatre, Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, West Ottawa High School and Middle School Theatre. She has also designed costumes for Heritage Theatre in Grand Rapids.  Some memorable GVSU shows Sally has worked on are Guys and Dolls, Ragtime, Hamlet, Servant of Two Masters, Cymbeline, Secret Garden, Lady from the Sea, Rocky Horror.

Karen Libman, Associate Professor of Theatre, holds a B.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University and an M.F.A. from Arizona State University. She taught for several years at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, SUNY-Cortland, and Illinois State University before joining the faculty of Grand Valley State University in 1999. National directing credits include Crackerbarrel! (Nebraska Theatre Caravan tour production); The Princess and the Pea, Aladdin (Nebraska Repertory Theatre); A Christmas Carol (Ithaca, New York); The Snow Queen (Mesa, Arizona); and the world premiere of the award-winning play, Rachel's Night (Bloomington, Illinois). Her work has been seen locally at Heritage Theatre, Grand Rapids Civic Theatre, and Grand Rapids Jewish Theatre. GVSU stage productions include the 1999, 2000, 2002, 2006, and 2008 GVSU Shakespeare Festival mainstage shows, the internationally touring 2005 and 2007 Bard to Go, as well as Big Love , Mother Courage and Children and the award-winning Angels in America, Part 1. A professional storyteller, Professor Libman performs at festival, museums, and schools such as the Grand Rapids (MI) Art Museum, the Michigan Storytelling Festival, the Kansas City Storytelling Festival, and The Nebraska Storytelling Festival. She has been active in many national and international organizations including the American Alliance for Theatre and Education, the International Drama Education Association, and the National Storytelling Association. Her published work can be seen in such journals as Arts Education Policy Review, Teaching Theatre, Youth Theatre Journal, and Research in Drama Education; and she was the Editor of the quarterly journal STAGE of the Art (published by the American Alliance for Theatre and Education) from 1999-2001. During her 2002 sabbatical, she was a Guest Instructor at the Kaplan Center for Educational Drama at New York University. She also premiered the one-woman show, Virginia Woolf: the Last Day, which was written for her by Florida Playwright Richard Janaro. The Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Association honored Libman for her Meritorious Achievement in Directing in 1999, and she was named the Woman Artist of the Year by the Lincoln-Lancaster Women's Commission in 1998. In 2006, she was honored by the university with the Women and Gender Studies Program Barbara Jordan Award, and in 2008 she received the AATE 2008 Lin Wright Special Recognition Award, giving her national recognition for her work with the Grand Valley Bard to Go Program. Her interest in excellence in teaching dates to her work with standards in arts education (she was a member of the Goals 2000 team that co-wrote the assessment portion of the Nebraska State Arts Frameworks, and she helped to review the Nationals Standards in Arts Education), and her numerous workshop presentations on drama, teacher education, arts advocacy, outreach theatre, literacy, storytelling, and social justice. Professor Libman enjoys administrative work as well, and has served as the Interim Assistant Director of the Pew Faculty Teaching and Learning Center in 2004; as Interim Chair of the Department of Classics during the 2005-06 academic year; as Interim Director of the GVSU Honors College in 2007; and as Interim Chair of the Department of Art and Design during Winter and Spring 2008.

 Christopher Mahlmann is the Technical Director for the Louis Armstrong Theatre.

Alfred Sheffield is a theatre designer supervising GVSU students' work in design and theatre technology. A graduate of Northwestern University's M.F.A. program, Alfred has worked on technical assignments at Chicago's Marriot Theatre, CBS News Chicago, and the Northwestern University Dance Festival. He has worked for fourteen years in professional summer stock and regional arts festivals, serving as scenographer and technical director at the Tibbets Summer Theatre in Coldwater, Mchigan and the Carolina Civic Center in Lumberton, North Carolina. He taught and designed for such institutions as the University of Michigan's Flint campus, The University of North Carolina, and Kansas State University before joining GVSU's theatre faculty in 1997. He continues to explore the latest advances in computer-assisted stage & lighting design technology, and to coach GVSU students interested in pursuing careers in the field.

Katherine Mayberry (Introduction to Theatre and Bard to Go) is an alumna of Grand Valley State University, where she appeared in several Shakespeare Festival productions, including playing Lady Macbeth in Macbeth. She received her Master of Letters and Master of Fine Arts (Acting Emphasis) in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature in Performance from Mary Baldwin College in Partnership with the American Shakespeare Center. While in the MLitt/MFA program, she performed such roles as Gertrude in Hamlet, Isabella in Measure for Measure, and Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost at the ASC’s Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia. Katherine has also studied Shakespearean acting with the London Theatre Exchange and at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. She has received further actor training at the Michael Chekhov Institute and recently completed an intensive colloquium in Commedia Del ’Arte with master teacher Antonio Fava. During her time as a GVSU undergraduate, Katherine was a founding cast member of the Grand Haven-based Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company, for which she now serves as Executive Director. She performs regularly as a part of Pigeon Creek’s acting company, and in this summer’s season played Celia in As You Like It and Elizabeth in Richard III, productions which toured to several Michigan venues as well as out of state. She currently teaches as an adjunct professor in both the Theatre and English programs at GVSU.

Brian Web Russell, A.E.A. (Acting-Oberon/Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream)  Brian  is thrilled to be making his third trip back to Allendale and to the stage of the Grand Valley Shakespeare Festival. Previously, Brian performed as both leisure suit wearing Antiphilus twins in 2000's The Comedy of Errors and as the malevolent moneylender Shylock in 2002's The Merchant Of Venice. Brian's regional credits include The Drawer Boy, One Man's Lincoln (Kentucky Repertory Theatre), The Crucible, Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol, (Tennessee Repertory Theatre), God's Man In Texas (Arkansas Repertory Theatre), Stones In His Pocket, Chapter Two (American Stage Company), The Mystery Of Irma Vep, Mother Courage and Her Children (People's Branch Theatre), Boy Gets Girl, Metamorphoses (Actor's Bridge Ensemble), Gross Indecency, A Doll's House (Mockingbird Theatre), The Reluctant Dragon, Most Valuable Player (Nashville Children's Theatre). Brian’s Shakespeare credits include The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Winter's Tale (Nashville Shakespeare Festival), Macbeth, Othello (Tennessee Rep), The Tempest (Arkansas Rep) Romeo and Juliet (Nevada Shakespeare Festival in conjunction with Arkansas Rep) Measure For Measure, The Merry Wives Of Windsor (East Tennessee Shakespeare Festival) and Taming Of The Shrew (American Stage). In 2005, Brian was selected to perform in the ground-breaking, trans-Atlantic multi-media production of Das Treffen: The Other Side, a unique collaboration between Tennessee Rep and Germany's innovative theatremagdeburg. His film credits include The Cursed (2008), Existo (2000) and the upcoming Blood. This past spring, Brian was one of eight "working" regional actors profiled in the theatrical trade magazine "Backstage". Among other accolades, Brian was the proud recipient of the 2001 Ingram Theatre Fellowship, awarded annually by the Tennessee Arts Commission. Brian is a member of Actor's Equity Association and served as Nashville's Actor Hotline coordinator for four years and as Liaison Committee Chair for one year. * Brian Webb Russell appeared through the courtesy of Actors’ Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States 

Stephen Greenblatt, (Shakespeare Scholar) Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Founder of the "new historicism," Greenblatt is a specialist in Shakespeare, sixteenth - and seventeenth-century English literature, the literature of travel and exploration, and literary theory. Former president of the Modern Language Association, he is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society, and a permanent fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. Greenblatt is the author and editor of numerous books, including Will in the World (2004; a New York Times best seller), Hamlet in Purgatory (2001), The Norton Anthology of English Literature (general editor, 2006), Practicing New Historicism (with Catherine Gallagher, 2000), Norton Shakespeare (general editor, 1997), New World Encounters (editor, 1993), Marvelous Possessions (1991), Learning to Curse (1990), Shakespearean Negotiations (1988; winner of the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize), and Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), among others. He is the co-author (with Charles Mee) of a play, Cardenio, and is the founding editor of the journal Representations. As a recipient of the Mellon Distinguished Humanist Award, his research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim, Fulbright, the American Council of Learned Societies, and other funding agencies.

Mellissa Slack, (Stage Management) Mellissa is very happy to be returning to her alma mater for her fifth Shakespeare Festival. After graduating from Grand Valley in 2005 Mellissa went off to work as a stage manager for Carnival Cruise Lines. While working on the fun ships she was able to travel the world and work on elaborate Las Vegas-style productions. Between stints at sea Mellissa also had the opportunity to Assistant Stage Manage a mini tour of Metamorphoses for the Weston Playhouse Theatre Company in Vermont; and work with The Pioneer Theatre Company out in Salt Lake City, Utah on The Producers. While not at sea and traveling about Mellissa spends a couple months a year at Mason Street Warehouse in Saugatuck, MI where she has stage managed such productions as Smokey Joe's Cafe, Cabaret, Urinetown, What a Glorious Feeling, As Bees in Honey Drown and Evita! As always she would like to thank her parents for putting up with her never-resting schedule.

Chris Hayes, (Shakespeare Festival Workshop) Chris has enjoyed an international career as a theatre director for some forty years with more than 200 productions to his credit. In the UK he has worked with most major regional theatres including the Royal Shakespeare Company and in London at the National Theatre and with many productions in the West End and on the Fringe. He is a frequent guest director overseas across Europe and in Ireland and in North and South America. As an Artistic Director he has been responsible for running six theatre companies including The Marlowe Theatre Canterbury, The Ludlow Shakespeare Festival Theatre and the Theatre Royal Plymouth.

Whilst directing seasons at the Mermaid Theatre in London in the 1990s, he established London Theatre Exchange with a group of colleagues in order to develop international co-productions, new writing opportunities and cross-cultural training programs. To date this company has been involved in 15 productions and has run more than 50 workshops for actors, directors and teachers in the UK and abroad.

Hayes’ most recent productions include, in London, the UK premiere of Arthur Miller’s Playing for Time and the English language premiere of Crossing, a new play from South Africa by Reza de Wet at the Riverside Studios. He has directed 22 Shakespeare productions most recently Macbeth (Manchester, England), Othello (Atlanta), Hamlet (Salt Lake City), an all-women version of Henry Vth (Middlebury,VT), Romeo and Juliet (Munich and tour, Germany) and a six-person adaptation of Measure for Measure (Washington DC).

Alongside his professional work Hayes has also worked as a teacher for several college programs including an association with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for more than 30 years. He returns to England from Michigan to direct Ibsen’s rarely revived late masterpiece, Little Eyolf.

Chris Hayes will be directing the 2009 Grand Valley Shakespeare Festival production Romeo and Juliet.

Christopher Weaver, (Assistant Director for A Midsummer Night's Dream) Christopher is thrilled to be returning to the Shakespeare Festival for the fifth consecutive year, having previously played Elbow in Measure for Measure, Claudius in Hamlet, Boyet in Love's Labour's Lost, and Jachimo in Cymbeline. Christopher has also played Lysander in A Midsummer Nights Dream three times, Malvolio in Twelfth Night twice, and various roles in eight other Shakespeare plays. Locally Christopher has performed for several theatre companies including The Snake in The Apple Tree and the productions Wit and Godspell at Circle theatre; Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing and in Romeo and Juliet and Merry Wives of Windsor for Heritage Theatre Group; and Scrooge, The Musical for Civic theatre. Christopher also directed Heritage theatre's highly popular production of Pump Boys and Dinettes. Last summer, Christopher directed Midsummer for a summer youth theatre program in Hastings, Michigan. In his spare time Christopher sings bass in the Original Dickens Carolers, and he teaches acting classes at Civic theatre and for the Home School Ancillary Program in Wyoming, Michigan. The rest of his spare time goes to loving his wife and two children.

Keith Oberfeldt, (Lighting Designer) Keith has designed in West Michigan and nationally since 1972. Recent favorite productions include Sweeney Todd and Dreamgirls at Grand Rapids Civic Theatre, It Ain't Nothin' but the Blues (national tour), Romeo and Juliet for the Heritage Theatre Group, and Don Carlo for Palm Beach Opera. Oberfeld was the lighting designer for the Shakespeare Festival productions Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream and has designed the lighting for several GVSU Opera Theatre productions, including Bartered Bride, Guys and Dolls, Street Scene, The Secret Garden, Ragtime, and Candide. In 2007 Keith received a Michigan Emmy Award for lighting design for the children's television show "Come on Over"