Core Faculty
Stan Brown (W. Rockwell Wirtz Professor) earned his MFA in Acting from the University of South Carolina in 1989. While there, Stan was named a graduate acting fellow at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington D.C., where he received the core of his classical actor training.
Stan began his work in university teaching at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England, where he taught acting and was a postgraduate researcher in Contemporary Shakespearean Performance (exploring director Peter Brook’s body of work with the Royal Shakespeare Company). In the U.K., Stan was invited to work with the voice department at the RSC by Cicely Berry, RSC Director of Voice and the author of internationally renowned books Voice and the Actor, The Actor and His Text, and Text in Action. This training and experience initiated Stan’s ongoing explorations into perceptions and impacts of ‘culture’ on voice and speech training for the actor. He maintained an active professional relationship with the RSC’s voice department and, specifically, Ms. Berry and her work until her retirement and passing in 2018. Apart from his work as a teacher, voice/dialect coach, and director, Stan has worked as a professional actor for over 30 years in American and British theatre, film, television and radio. Some of his credits include featured roles on NBC’s Homicide: Life in the Streets and recurring roles on In the Heat of the Night and the critically acclaimed I’ll Fly Away. In film, Stan co-starred in Robby Benson’s Modern Love and the cult film Getting In opposite Calista Flockhart, Matthew Perry, Dave Chapelle, and Christine Baranski. The film was the directorial debut of Doug Liman, who would later direct Swingers, Bourne Identity, and Mr. & Mrs. Smith. In 2015 Stan played the lead in the short film The Bespoke Tailoring of Mr. Bellamy. The film won the prestigious Louisiana Film Prize—the largest monetary prize in the world for short film—and was shortlisted for the Academy Award ballot. Stan also won the Louisiana Film Prize Best Actor award for his work.
Shana Cooper, MFA (Assistant Professor) is a company member at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., where her directing credits include The Nether and HIR by Taylor Mac. Other directing credits include The Unfortunates (A.C.T., SF); American Night, Romeo and Juliet (Yale Repertory Theatre); Straight White Men (Studio Theater); The Unfortunates (World Premiere Musical), Julius Caesar, Love’s Labor’s Lost (Oregon Shakespeare Festival); Venus In Fur (Seattle Rep, Arizona Theatre Company), The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (California Shakespeare Theater); A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Playmakers Rep); Camino Real (New York University MFA Program); Three Sisters (The Studio/New York); The Whale Play, Twelfth Night Parking Lot Project (New Theater House). Shana was the associate artistic director of the California Shakespeare Theater (2000-2004), and also a cofounder of New Theater House with Yale School of Drama alumni (2008-present). Awards include: 2014 U Grant, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered by TCG; 2010 Princess Grace Award; Julian Milton Kaufman Memorial Prize in Directing (Yale School of Drama); Drama League Directing Fellow; TCG Observership Grant; Oregon Shakespeare Festival Phil Killian Directing Fellow; G. Herbert Smith Presidential Scholarship.
Roger Ellis, MFA (Assistant Professor) (they/them) is a director who works across screen and stage. Recent projects include the docu-musical Happy Songs About Unhappy Things (co-director), Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 at Writers Theatre (associate director), and the documentary Emergency Contact (director).
Professor Ellis directed Nikki Lynette’s afrogoth musical Get Out Alive (Steppenwolf, National Alliance for Musical Theatre, film adaptation). Ellis’ film work has screened internationally at festivals such as Black Harvest (Gene Siskel Center), Melbourne Lift-off (Australia), School of Sound (London, UK), San Francisco IndieFest’s Decibels Music Film Festival, African Diaspora International Film Festival (NYC), and Pan African Arts and Film Festival (Los Angeles). Other stage work includes Ephemera by Deborah Black, Sophia Treanor, and Mary Overlie (Dancer – Clurman MAD series at Stella Adler NYC), The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (movement director – Horizon Theatre/Aurora Theatre), and AntigoneNOW (movement designer – Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre). Roger has worked across the US with Writers Theatre, Sacramento Music Circus, American Music Theatre Project, California Center for the Arts, Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma, Tuacahn Center for the Arts, Paramount Theatre, and San Diego Repertory.
Ellis’ research in contemporary theatre explores the interplay between the synthetic and somatic through the mixed reality of Black-queer experience. The conceptual grit of Ellis’ work is anchored in xenoqueer and xenofeminist theory. Ellis has undergone extensive study with Fay Simpson (Lucid Body), Stephen Wangh (Acrobat of the Heart, Grotowski), Mary Overlie, Deborah Black, Sophia Treanor (Six Viewpoints, Hamilton Technique), Wendell Beavers (Developmental Movement), and Erika Berland (Experiential Anatomy). MFA San Diego State University; BA Oklahoma City University; and certified Lucid Body Teacher.
Ellis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre at Northwestern University, where they teach courses in movement, music theatre, physical theatre, and directing for the musical. Ellis serves as the coordinator of the movement area for Northwestern’s MFA Acting Program.
Professor Ellis is a member of Actors’ Equity Association (AEA), Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), and National Alliance of Acting Teachers (NAAT).
Sandra Marquez, MFA (Assistant Professor and Program Director) is an ensemble member at Steppenwolf Theater as well as Teatro Vista where she served as associate artistic director from 1998-2006. Her directing credits include the Joseph Jefferson Award-nominated production of Our Lady of the Underpass by Tanya Saracho. Most recent acting credits include The Motherfu**er with the Hat, Mary Page Marlowe, The Doppelganger, and The Roommate (Steppenwolf); Wolf at the End of the Block, Between You, Me and the Lampshade, and A View from the Bridge (Teatro Vista); Iphigenia at Aulis, Agamemnon, and Electra (Court Theater), Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner (Oregon Shakespeare Festival), Mala Hierba (Second Stage, Uptown), Mojada (Victory Gardens), and The Happiest Song Plays Last (Goodman). Ms. Marquez is a recipient of a Joseph Jefferson Award for Best Supporting Actress in A View from the Bridge and the Sor Juana Award for Contribution to the Arts and Latino Community from the National Museum of Mexican Art. A proud member of AEA and SAG-AFTRA she has worked in numerous national commercials, industrial films, and print work. Film and TV credits include: Boss, Prison Break, Chicago Code, Chicago Med, and Timer. She has been a member of the theatre faculty at Northwestern University since 1995, where she very much enjoys teaching and mentoring young people.
Anna D. Shapiro, MFA (Professor) is a Tony Award-winning director and the artistic director of Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. She has directed several notable productions at Steppenwolf, including August: Osage County (2008 Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards), The Motherf**ker with the Hat (also on Broadway, 2011 Tony nomination for Best Director), Visiting Edna, Mary Page Marlowe and Man from Nebraska. Broadway credits include Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men, Larry David’s Fish in the Dark, Of Mice and Men and the Steppenwolf revival of This Is Our Youth. Shapiro is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama and Columbia College and the recipient of a 1996 Princess Grace Award, as well as the 2010 Princess Grace Statue Award. She is a professor in Northwestern University’s Department of Theatre and has served as the Director of the Graduate MFA Directing Program since 2002.
Jessica Thebus, PhD (Associate Professor and Director of the MFA in Directing program) is an associate artist with Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where she has directed Sex with Strangers, Intimate Apparel, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, When the Messenger Is Hot, and Sonia Flew. Among many others, she has also directed As You Like It at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The Clean House and Stage Kiss at The Goodman Theatre, A Civil War Christmas at The Huntington Theatre, Harriet Jacobs at Kansas City Repertory Theatre, and Jekyll and Hyde, Inherit the Wind, and Red Herring at Northlight Theatre. In 2009, Thebus co-directed a Lookingglass Theatre production of Our Town with fellow faculty member Anna D. Shapiro. Her favorite projects include the award-winning plays Pulp and Winesburg, Ohio at About Face Theatre, as well as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s world premiere of Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter, which then moved to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. An artistic associate at the Corn Exchange in Dublin, Ireland, Thebus holds a PhD in performance studies from Northwestern. She teaches seminars in Advanced Directing, American Realism and Naturalism, and Collaboration Techniques for Designers and Directors.
Cristal Chanelle Truscott, PhD (Associate Professor) is a culture worker, scholar, educator, playwright, director, founder of the touring ensemble Progress Theatre, and creator of “SoulWork” – a generative method for making performance, training artists, engaging communities and framing analytical research that is rooted in generations-old African American cultural practices, theories and performance traditions. She is a recipient of the Doris Duke Impact Artist Award, given to those “influential in shaping powerful creative movements in contemporary arts,” as well as the 2023 United States Artist Award, the Creative Capital Award, MAP Fund, NPN Creation Fund, and NEFA National Theatre Project grants.
As a culture worker and artist, Dr. Truscott is director of SoulWork Studio and has led Progress Theatre in using art as anti-racism to connect communities via a broad, deeply linked grassroots network fostered nationally and internationally. She writes a capella musicals called “NeoSpirituals” that span and straddle time between histories and the present to explore identities, inheritances/legacies and cultural movements to encourage connection, consciousness, and healing. These include PEACHES (in Plays from the Boom Box Galaxy, TCG Books), ‘MEMBUH, and The Burnin’. Plantation Remix, her current work-in-progress, is a site-responsive NeoSpiritual to radically re-imagine the separatist genre of heritage tourism by rehearsing a contemporary, multi-cultural, future-building “afterlife” for historic sites related to slavery in the U.S. Her plays blend pop culture and academic conversations, fusing genre from Negro Spirituals and Folklore to Blues, R&B, and Hip Hop to produce performances that engage communities across race, class, gender, and spiritual identity.
Dr. Truscott’s scholarly research investigates and excavates oral traditions, cultural knowledge and community practices as performance methodology for use by artists/practitioners, educators, community-invested programs and arts organizations seeking to offer inclusive, dynamic artist training, curricula and/or programming. As a performance studies scholar, she researches and writes about spiritual diversity in African American Theatre and the arts’ essential role in movements for liberation using the theory she developed called the “Cultural Conservatory.” She has served as assistant editor of the performance journal TDR: The Drama Review; associate editor for Azizah Magazine; and on the editorial boards of the publications Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory and Black Masks Magazine.