Lecturer, Modern Dance, Merce Cunningham Technique, Choreography. B.F.A in Theater; M.A. in Dance; Assistant Professor, Dance Department at the University of Maryland, founding member of the Maryland Dance Theater. Frank then moved to New York City to begin an eleven-year career with Douglas Dunn and Dancers, touring nationally and internationally. She trained with Merce Cunningham and was a member of his teaching staff at the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio for eight years; at Cunningham’s request, she taught 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, 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, Frank teaches intermediate and advanced modern technique, choreographs, 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 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"; 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. In 2011, she assisted 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. Recent site-specific projects include “Construction Site” and “Action SEQuence: Six Dances on the SEQ.” 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; eleven schools gather to share studio practices, creative processes, and performances of works. 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, and “Escalating Overlap for Figure/Ground.” Her work "Twilight Composite" was selected for performance at the American College Dance Festival Gala at the Kennedy Center in March 2012. Frank has twice served as Acting Director of the Dance Division.

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 a 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.

Alex Ketley, Lecturer Ballet and Choreography. Alex Ketley is an independent choreographer and the director of The Foundry, a contemporary dance company based in San Francisco. Formally a classical dancer with the San Francisco Ballet (1994-1998), he performed a wide range of classical and contemporary repertory including the work of William Forsythe, James Kudelka, and George Balanchine in San Francisco and on tour throughout the world.

In 1998 he left the San Francisco Ballet to co-found The Foundry in order to explore his deepening interests in choreography, improvisation, mixed media work, and collaborative process. With The Foundry he has been an artist-in-residence at many leading art institutions including Headlands Center for the Arts (2001 and 2007), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (2002), The Yard (2003), the Santa Fe Art Institute (2004 and 2006), the Taipei Artist Village (2005), ODC Theater (2006), and the Ucross Foundation (2007). The Foundry has produced fifteen full evening length works that have received extensive support from the public, funders, and the press, as well as a number of single-channel video pieces that have screened at international video festivals.

As a choreographer independent of his work with The Foundry, Alex Ketley has been commissioned to create original pieces for companies and universities throughout the United States and Europe. For this work he has received acknowledgement from the Hubbard Street 2 National Choreographic Competition (2001), the International Choreographic Competition of the Festival des Arts de Saint-Saveaur (2004), the National Choo-San Goh Award (2005), the inaugural Princess Grace Award for Choreography (2005), the BNC National Choreographic Competition (2008), three CHIME Fellowships (2007, 2008, and 2012), two Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography Residencies (2007 and 2009), the Gerbode-Hewlett Choreographer Commissioning Award (2009), and the National Eben Demarest Award (2012). His pieces and collaborations have also been awarded Isadora Duncan Awards in the categories of Outstanding Achievement by an Ensemble (2009), Outstanding Achievement in Choreography (2011), and Outstanding Achievement by a Company (2011 & 2012).

For 2011, in addition to commissions from Ballet Leipzig and the Juilliard School, his AXIS Dance Company work “To Color Me Different” was presented on national television through an invitation from the show So You Think You Can Dance. With The Foundry in 2012, he was deeply engaged in a new project entitled “No Hero” which explored what dance means and how it is experienced by people throughout more rural parts of the United States. The video projection Alex created for No Hero was nominated for a 2012 Isadora Duncan Award for Outstanding Achievement in Visual Design.

In early 2013, he was a visiting professor and artist at Florida State University, where he taught ballet, created a new work, and served as an advisor to the MFA students in their choreography. He was also awarded the first Princess Grace Foundation Choreography Mentorship Co-Commission Award (CMCC), which he is using to work on a collaborative project with Miguel Guiterrez in 2014.

Along with his direction of The Foundry and his various independent projects, he helped Summer Lee Rhatigan create The San Francisco Conservatory of Dance in 2004, an organization where he still serves as an advisor, teacher, and the Resident Choreographer. Stemming from a classical foundation, the school is deeply invested in advanced students learning and growing though the engagement of contemporary choreography.

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.

Lecturer, Hip-Hop. Ronnie Reddick is one of the Bay Area’s most dynamic and multi-talented choreographers with an edge of what’s happening in the world of dance and fashion today. This multi-faceted San Francisco based Choreographer/Dancer made his mark by combining Hip Hop, Jazz, Fashion and Theatrics to create one of the most explosive and dynamic styles to hit the dance scene recently, making him one of the most sought after Hip Hop/Contemporary choreographers in the Bay Area and beyond. Along with his busy career, Reddick is also the Choreographer/Show Director at Asia SF. This unique restaurant/dining experience is taking the world by storm and features one of the most beautiful gender illusionists in the world.

In the entertainment world, Reddick has worked with such artists as Michael & Janet Jackson, Deborah Cox, Paula Abdul, Kristine W., Tony, Toni, Tone, Jody Watley, Santana, Kelly Price, RuPaul, Robin Thicke, Snoop Dogg, Overtone Band and M.C. Hammer along with many corporations like Sony, Sony PlayStation, Intuit, Prudential, Gap, Macy’s, MAC Cosmetics, Nordstrom, Starbucks, API, Apple Computer, Google, Yahoo, Xilinx, Sun Micro Systems, BEBE, Univision Television, E*Trade, Coca Cola, and Microsoft.

In addition to teaching at Stanford, Reddick teaches at Santa Clara University and has taught master classes around the world, including Princeton University, Japan, South Korea, Mexico and Canada. He continues to work with, train, and inspire dancers that are now dancing around the world. Reddick also teaches dancers about the business of dance and how to work in today's world as a professional commercial dancer.

“Technique is only the beginning of what makes a memorable dancer, and we don’t start dancing to end up doing chorus," says Reddick. “You have got to have that extra something.” It is through his experience and selfless devotion that Ronnie Reddick is inspiring a new generation of talent.

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.

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.

Lecturer, Movement and Acting. Tracy Hazas teaches courses in movement for theater at Stanford, and is an actor and movement director based in San Francisco. She has performed at various NYC theaters including New York City Center, Dixon Place, Theater for the New City, and HERE. She has appeared in immersive theater productions with Punchdrunk and Elastic City, collaborated on performance projects with DreamLab (dir. Niegel Smith) and performance artist Susana Cook, and been featured in dance-theater works by choreographers Charles Moulton and Annie Loui. Regionally, she has performed at Theaterworks (Colorado), Company of Angels (LA), VoxTheater (NH) and other venues. Tracy has choreographed movement and stage combat for San Francisco’s Word for Word, Stanford Repertory Theater, the Davis Shakespeare Ensemble and others.

She has taught in the BA/BFA programs in Drama at UC Irvine and in a range of programs for screen and stage actors in New York. She received a BA in Comparative Literature and Spanish from Smith College, an MA in Performance Studies from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts and an MFA in Acting from UC Irvine. "Hazas" rhymes with the Spanish “casas.”

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.

Lecturer, Acting. Kay Kostopoulos directs and teaches acting, acting pedagogy, musical theater, voice, speech, and Shakespeare in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS) and Continuing Studies Program at Stanford University. She teaches “Acting with Power” at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and has coached for the Knight Fellows Journalism Program, the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and the Department of English. Kay has created and directed training programs for Stanford’s School of Medicine.

Kay is a singer and actress who has performed in many Bay Area and regional theaters, including A.C.T., the Magic Theatre, the San Francisco and California Shakespeare Festivals, and Stanford Repertory Theatre. She has additional credits in voiceover, film, and television. Kay leads her own jazz ensemble, Black Olive Jazz. She draws from her acting background and her Mediterranean heritage to establish a unique sound in Jazz, bringing this vision to audiences all around the San Francisco Bay Area. Featuring Kay on vocals with master musicians from the local jazz scene, Kay performs songs from film and the Broadway stage to jazz standards, along with groundbreaking offerings from the “world music” genre. www.blackoliveazz.com

Kay teaches seminars in the "jazz mindset" and the skills that go along with it which are essential in business settings today. She has also taught private seminars for live and on-line presentation for Twitter, Genentech, Cisco, Hitachi, Lippincott, Ernst and Young, First Republic, Stanford’s Executive Program for Women and Women in Entrepreneurship Program, eBay’s Global Women’s Conference and Women In Cable Telecommunications. Her work has been featured in “O” magazine, and she has been featured on NPR’s Philosophy Talk radio program for her work on understanding facial emotions in the treatment of Autism.

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 taught “Acting for Teachers” at Dominican University and acting and directing at City College of San Francisco, American Musical Theatre of San Jose, and DeAnza College. She served as Education Director at The California Shakespeare Festival. At Stanford, Kay performed multiple voices in “Encountering Homer’s Odyssey,” an online classics program through the Stanford/Princeton/Yale Alliance. She has directed and performed in educational and centennial projects for Stanford’s Continuing Studies Program, including the Emily Dickinson, William Saroyan, Charles Darwin, and Robert Frost centennials.

Lecturer, Production Stage Management. Laxmi Kumaran has been working as a stage manager in the Bay Area for the past 10 years, currently at California Shakespeare Theater. Before moving to the Bay Area, Laxmi stage managed in Chicago for a variety of theaters, including the Goodman Theatre and the Court Theatre. Laxmi has taught in the theater departments at San Jose State, Northern Illinois and DePaul universities, and at the University of California Santa Cruz. She currently splits her time teaching at Stanford University and the University of California Berkeley.

Senior Lecturer: Costume Design, Theatrical Makeup, History of Fashion. Connie has been designing costumes for the performing arts for over 30 years, educationally and professionally. She has designed for opera, dance and film, including new works and premieres. Her designs have been seen in the Bay Area at TheatreWorks, Oakland Ballet, West Bay Opera, and Opera San Jose. As an accomplished textile artist, she has utilized those skills in her design work as well as collaborations with other designers. She has created and adapted textiles for various companies such as the San Francisco Ballet, American Conservatory Theatre, Smuin Ballet, Alonzo King Lines Ballet, Luhrman productions, and Berkeley Repertory Theatre. She extends those skills to the fashion arena and designs and handprints yardage for local designers.

Connie is a practicing union make-up artist, working for San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Ballet, and Mark Morris Dance Group as well as various films, and fashion photography. Her most memorable experience was participating in a project photographed by Annie Liebowitz about women living with HIV.

Connie is a full time Senior Lecturer at Stanford University and teaches in the area of Design. She is a member of United Scenic Artists of America, Local #829.

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. Improv Wisdom is also published as an Ebook and as an Audiobook read by the author. It has been translated and published into nine languages.