Joan Bruemmer, Interim Director, BFA Performance
BFA, New York University
MFA, Naropa University

Joan Bruemmer has taught Movement and Acting at Naropa University, Working Classrooms in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Dance Theater of Cologne, Festival D'Avignon, School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam, The Moscow Art Theater, CounterPULSE and San Francisco Dancer's Group. She is artistic director of San Francisco’s Marijoh DanzTheatre, a movement theater company known for integrating multidisciplinary techniques and original text for the stage. In San Francisco, her work has been performed at ODC Theater, the San Francisco Edge Festival, San Francisco Fringe Festival, Women on the Edge Festival, Theater Artaud, Dance Mission and The Marsh. In New York she performed at The Kitchen, P.S. 122, St. Mark's Church, Theater Regenesis, ABCnoRio and St. John the Divine. She was invited to perform twice at the Festival D’Avignon in France and her work has been performed internationally as part of works-in-residence in Germany, France, the Netherlands and at the International Theater Festival in Arezzo. She was selected Pick of the Fringe for 2005 and 2006 for original works produced at the Boulder International Fringe Festival. She has performed with Meredith Monk, and been directed by The Siti Company and Leigh Fondakowski of the Tectonic Theater. Recent acting credits include Mrs. Freeman in square product theatre’s Good Country People; Carol in Theatre13’s The Deer and the Antelope Play and the Nurse in Boulder Ensemble Theatre’s Antigone.

Barbara Dilley
BA, Mount Holyoke College

Barbara Dilley studied and performed dance in New York City from 1960–1975 with the Merce Cunningham Co. (1963–1968) and the Grand Union, a dance/theater collaboration that was to extend the definitions of the art of improvisation (1969–1976). Beginning in 1974 she has taught at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo., first designing the Dance/Movement Studies Program, then serving as President (1985–1993). Her teaching emphasizes "embodied awareness" through dance/movement studies, creative compositional processes and the disciplines of meditation. Throughout these years she has created dance and performance art; most recently the dEsoLAtedEliGHt Project: 2008-09, and skits for Lady Wabi Sabi. She has two children, Ben Lloyd and Owen Bondurant, and two grandchildren, Griffen and Ella Lloyd.

Article by Barbara Dilley: "Teacher's Wisdom"

Cara Reeser, BFA Performance
BA, Sarah Lawrence College
MFA, New York University

Cara relocated to Colorado from New York City in 1994. She has performed and choreographed for her Denver-based dance company, Still Moving Dances, since its inception in 1994. Cara’s works have been commissioned by The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, where she has been collaborating with local artists on site-specific performance works for the past several years. Cara was a member of the Mariposa Artists Collective from 1997 to 2001 and has enjoyed dancing and collaborating with many local and nationally based artists on performance projects throughout the US. She has served on the faculty of Naropa since 1997 and has taught at the Colorado Dance Festival, as well as locally in Boulder, Denver, and Fort Collins, since 1994. Cara is a second generation pilates instructor who had the honor to mentor under Master Teacher Kathleen Stanford Grant, and owns Denver Pilates Studio Pilates Aligned Inc. Currently, Cara teaches workshops in movement education, dance and pilates around the nation.

Joanna Rotkin
MFA, Bennington College

Originally from Boulder, Colorado, Joanna relocated to New York City to pursue her work as a choreographer, dancer, and performer. After receiving an MFA from Bennington College in 2002, Joanna returned to her hometown to continue her work as a performing artist and dance educator. She is the founder of TinHouse Experimental Dance Theatre, a dance company committed to creating experimental dance performance that uses the raw physicality of the human form to bring images, dreams, hallucinations, and fantasies into focus through powerful, bold, and electrifying movement. In 2003, Joanna founded the educationally based dance program, As the Crow Flies, in order to bring dance to a wider and more diverse community. Elders, youth, and developmentally disabled adults gather regularly to practice improvisational dance forms, challenging and nurturing each other to go beyond perceived notions with the hope of learning to appreciate diversity and difference in our community through the medium of dance. Joanna has taught at The Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, Bennington College, Prescott College, and the Shambhala Center in Boulder. Joanna currently teaches at Naropa University, The University of Colorado, and in the community while performing and choreographing regularly with her company.

Leeny Sack
BA, SUNY Empire State College

Leeny Sack is a performance artist, teacher/counselor of autobiographically-derived work and certified Master Teacher of Kinetic Awareness. She has performed and taught extensively throughout the U.S., Europe and in Asia. She is a former faculty member of New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, Experimental Theatre Wing (1982-89), co-founder and director of Pangea Farm, a retreat center for contemplative and healing arts (1989-2000), and workshop leader of the annual Art of Presence retreats at the Buddhistisches Zentrum, Austria (1984-2000). Leeny Sack is best known for The Survivor and the Translator: a solo theatre work about not having experienced the Holocaust, by a daughter of concentration camp survivors, and for her work with Richard Schechner’s renowned experimental theatre company, The Performance Group. She attended The Juilliard School and studied with members of Jerzy Grotowski’s Polish Lab Theater. Her students have included performing and visual artists, as well as psychotherapists, physicians, social workers, educators, and others interested in self-research and the journey from inner experience to outer expression.

Robert Sussuma
BM, State University of New York, Fredonia
MM, The Longy School of Music

Robert Sussuma, counter-tenor, holds a Bachelor's degree in vocal performance from SUNY, Fredonia, in New York, a Master's degree in early music vocal performance from the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is a certified course instructor of the Estill Voice Training System and executive director of the Estill Voice Institute in Boulder, CO. Although he specializes in the performance of early vocal music (Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque), his performance experience and interests include musical theater, jazz, barbershop, rock, pop, choral, world, classical/opera and folk music. Currently, Robert is a soloist with and vocal coach for Boulder's nationally acclaimed choral ensemble The Ars Nova Singers. Additionally he performs regularly in Europe with Ensemble al Verso, and is in training to become a guild certified feldenkrais practitioner.

Robert's teaching philosophy is one that is rooted in self-awareness. He believes in the innate wisdom and potential of each individual and seeks to create a safe and expansive learning environment in which each student becomes like a scientist in the laboratory of his/her own experience--at once the experimenter, the observer as well as the experiment itself!

The Estill Voice Training System is a state-of-the-art approach to singing that allows one to know what one is actually doing while singing and speaking in different ways. This provides a foundational knowledge of how the human voice works which, in combination with awareness and new vocabulary of sensation helps create a more and more accurate image for singing. Since we "act in accordance with our self-image" (M. Feldenkrais), learning by exploring our experience is such a way that fills-in or 'vocal self-image' naturally brings more and more confidence, ease and potency to our singing.

Courses: Naropa Chorus, Special Topics: Modes, Medieval to Modern, BFA Performance Voice Component

Elizabeth Watt
MFA, Naropa University

Elizabeth Watt is a performer, educator and director. As one of the founding members of Aluminous, an emerging theatre company based in Boulder and Denver, she works with new and scripted work while encouraging the growth of ensemble theatre within the community. With several members of Aluminous, she produced and performed in Mrozek's Striptease in the Boulder International Fringe Festival. Recent directing ventures include assisting Steve Wangh with Testimony, an original play produced by Princeton University and Our Town, produced by Naropa University’s MFA CP program. In addition, Lizi has directed three award-winning original works in Boulder in recent years, including Maria est Perdue, which also traveled to San Francisco to show at the Women on the Edge Festival. Lizi works as a guest artist at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN, The William Inge Center in Kansas, and in Naropa University’s BFA and MFA programs. Among other past theatre endeavors, she is honored to have been a part of Naropa's first MFA Contemporary Performance graduating class (where she was directed in original works by Leigh Fondakowski of Tectonic Theater and by members of the SITI company), to have worked in St. Louis with Prison Performing Arts' The Hamlet Project (featured on NPR's This American Life) and to have toured for 3 years across the US and to Taiwan with Metro Theatre Company.

Lee Worley
BA, Mount Holyoke College
MA, Naropa University

Lee Worley founded the Theatre Studies program at Naropa in 1974. She has developed contemplative exercises for arts in education and contemplative education programs throughout her career at Naropa. She also taught theatre at a Buddhist-inspired middle school in Boulder for many years. She is one of a very few holders of the Mudra Space Awareness lineage—a performance training derived from Tibetan Yoga. She was a founding member, actress and teacher in Joseph Chaikin's Open Theater and is a senior student of Tibetan Buddhism. Her recent book, Coming from Nothing: The Sacred Art of Acting, outlines her contemplative acting method.

Article by Lee Worley:
"Mudra Space Awareness "

Master Artists In Residence and Guest Artist Faculty

Onye Ozuzu
Guest Artist

Onye Ozuzu is a performing artist, choreographer, educator and researcher. Her body of work fuses modern dance, West African dance, Japanese and Chinese martial arts, yoga, improvisational performance, literature and cultural studies. She has been actively making and performing work since 1997. Her work has been seen nationally and internationally at The Joyce Soho (Manhattan, NY), Kaay Fecc Festival Des Tous les Danses (Dakar, Senegal), La Festival del Caribe (Santiago, Cuba), Lisner Auditorium (Washington DC) among others. Current and up-coming projects include (as with TrojanWomen) vigorous engagement with interdisciplinary collaboration and feature works with painter Michael Dixon, filmmaker Adam DeMonet, sculptor Steve Silber, lighting designer Robert Shannon and others. Onye is currently serving as Associate Professor in Dance at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Peggy Pettitt
Master Teacher

Peggy Pettitt received a BA with distinction from Antioch College. Since 1974, Ms. Pettitt has facilitated scores of community-based, university and public school groups working in partnership with arts organizations to present their original stories in performance. As performance director of Elders Share the Arts, she founded and presented a group of New York City's finest older adult storytellers, the Pearls of Wisdom. Recipient of a National Endowment For The Arts Fellowship and New York City's Arts-In-Education Roundtable Award for Sustained Achievement, she continues to create theater and storytelling work with diverse groups of all ages for numerous organizations, including Age Exchange of London, New York University, Touchstone Theatre, Performance Space 122 and Central Park East Public School. A 2000–01 Fulbright Fellowship to Senegal culminated in an original play entitled The Spirit Factor based on living history in West Africa and the art of storytelling.

Rémy Tissier
Guest Artist

Rémy Tissier, painter, director and writer, has worked in collaboration with Peggy Pettitt to create more than 10 original plays, including The Spirit Factor and Caught Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Since 1985 he has lent his artistic vision to the performance work of numerous theatre ensembles, including Touchstone Theatre and New York Street Theatre Caravan, and to the solo works of Louise Smith and Greg Shamie. Tissier, 2001 Haiku laureate of the Embassy of Japan in Senegal, is author of Le Dédales de Disciples, a novel published in 2004 by L'Harmattan Press in Paris. Recipent of New York's Art Matters award for design, he is also an accomplished painter. Tissier received his classical and fine arts education in France.