Jonathan Levit’s career as a magician, actor, television host, magic consultant and producer spans nearly 40 years. Levit is highly respected in all areas of magic, including sleight of hand, mentalism, and magic history. His acting career began with a starring role as a con-artist magician in one of the most highly acclaimed episodes of The X-Files, playing opposite Ricky Jay. He has worked as a magic consultant for some of the biggest Hollywood films and television shows including Now You See Me, where he taught Jesse Eisenberg, Dave Franco, and Ayla Fisher. He has also worked with Steve Carell, Alan Arkin, and Olivia Wilde in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, Jack Davenport in Flashforward, David Duchovny on The X-Files and many other notable actors in Hollywood. He has consulted on magic television series taking him to the Middle East and other parts of the world. He also served as producer and magic consultant for Hip Hop Houdini and was a technical advisor for the NBC sitcom Like Magic. Jonathan is often hired to give private performances for the Hollywood elite such as Johnny Depp, Nicolas Cage, Tony Curtis, Dulé Hill and Teri Hatcher and he continues to be a frequent performer at the world-renowned Magic Castle in Los Angeles.
Moritz von Stuelpnagel, Director, For My Next Trick...
Moritz von Stuelpnagel previously collaborated with Michael Shayan on avaaz, which has toured the country for the past several years. Broadway: Hand to God (five Tony nods including Best Play and Director), I Need That, Bernhardt/Hamlet, and Present Laughter. London’s West End: Mad House, and Hand to God. Off-Broadway: MCC, Playwrights Horizons, Public Theater, Ma-Yi, MTC, LCT3, Lesser America, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and Ars Nova. Regional: Huntington, Geffen, Pasadena Playhouse, Alliance, Denver Center, Chicago Shakespeare, South Coast Rep, Williamstown, Olney, Woolly Mammoth, Barrington Stage, Chautauqua, Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, and more. Upcoming: his acclaimed production of Ava: The Secret Conversations written by and starring Elizabeth McGovern as Ava Gardner will tour New York, Chicago, and Toronto. Moritz is the former artistic director of Studio 42, NYC’s producer of “unproducible” plays. Visit moritzvs.com.
Malika Samuel, Actor, The Waterfall
Malika Samuel is an interdisciplinary storyteller and teaching artist with over two decades of experience in Broadway, Television, Film, and Stage. Broadway: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (OBC), Once on this Island, The Music Man (2000 Revival) NY Theater: By the Queen (HVSF), The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (HVSF), New Nigeria County (Simon & Schuster), Bite Me (WP & Colt Coeur) A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Double Feature), Bernarda’s Daughters (TNG/TNBT and TNG/Audible Theater), Crumbs from the Table of Joy (Keen), Our Dear Dead Drug Lord (WP) TV: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, EVIL, Orange Is the New Black, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, One Life to Live, Chicago P.D., Law & Order: SVU, The Good Wife, Person of Interest, The Big C, Rock of Ages, Hey Girl, Stella Hosting: Nick Studio 10, 2013 Kids’ Choice Awards Pre- Show, Kidz Bop Kidz Star USA Film: Caravan, Holiday Rush, Submission, Central Park, Hello Apartment, Kilimanjaro.
Patrice Johnson Chevannes, Actor, The Waterfall
Patrice's Broadway credit's include: Racing Demon, The Crucible. Her Off-Broadway credits include: Endgame, (Irish Rep); I’m Revolting, The Homecoming Queen, Halfway Bitches Go Straight To Heaven (Atlantic); The Half God of Rainfall, runboyrun/In Old Age (NYTW); Henry V (Public); Tamburlaine, Coriolanus (TFANA). Her regional theater credits include: Othello opposite Sir Patrick Stewart (Shakespeare Theater), The Grove (Huntington), Familiar (Yale Rep). On screen, her credits include: Undertow, Chambers, POSE, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The First Lady, The Good Fight. She has written/directed several films, including Kings County, NY’s Dirty Laundry, Hill and Gully. She is on faculty at The New School of Drama and is the Speech coach for the Obama Scholars @ Columbia. She has been nominated for several awards, including the 2023 Lucille Lortel Award for Endgame; 2020 Drama Desk and Drama League for runboyrun/In Old Age, Audelco for Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven. @patricejohnsoncheveannes.
Gladney, Musical Collaborator
Gladney, 2024 Foundation for Louisiana World Maker and sixth-generation New Orleans native, hails from the city’s iconic Lower 9th Ward. With a career spanning 20-year of high-profile performances, music videos, and live TV appearances, Gladney has been on The Kelly & Ryan Show, Late Night with Seth Meyers, and BBC’s The Graham Norton Show. His international collaborators include Jonathan Batiste, Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters, Ellis Marsalis, George Duke, Bret McKenzie, Solange, and Joe Dyson. A two-time GRAMMY nominee, Gladney contributed to Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah’s 2018 album, The Emancipation Procrastination with the feature track “Cages” and played a key role in the creation of The Rumble’s Stories From the Battlefield. Gladney leads a self-titled band, with the debut single “Selenite,” released in 2021, marking the beginning of their recording journey. He serves as the woodwind instructor at his alma mater, New Orleans Center for Creative Arts.
Kristen Leahy, Dramaturg, The Waterfall
Kristin Leahey, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at Boston University. She has freelanced as an artist around the country and internationally. Her publications include articles in Theatre Topics, Journal of American Drama, and New England Theatre Journal, as well as in the anthologies Teaching Performance Practices in Remote, Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy Anthology, and the Routledge Companion to Latine Theatre and Performance. She is a recipient of a Fulbright and was in collaboration with the Abbey Theatre.
christina michelle watkins, Resident Community Care Consultant
christina michelle (she/her), is a Black & Queer writer, performer, tarot reader, and licensed clinical social worker. Stories and relationships— listening to them, creating them, reconstructing them, connecting them— are the consistent threads in her work. She supports communities in creating cultures that provide reciprocal support, engage in authentic communication, and remember the ways interconnectedness can be the greatest strength. She’s currently exploring the non-linear nature of time, mysticism, and how to survive the end of this world while creating the next.
Vickie Chang, Community Care Facilitator
The second daughter of Chinese immigrants, Vickie Chang was born and raised in the SF Bay Area. Her work as a psychologist, facilitator, and writer is guided by Chinese ancestral wisdom; Indigenous teachings; and 大地母親 (the Great Earth Mother). She believes that freedom at its core is about connection— the capacity to live with 心 胸 寬 大 (xīn xiōng kuān dà), with a big heart, a vast heart that includes loving our human and nonhuman family, known and unknown.
She is passionate about supporting social change and is a member of Sacred Roots (a BIPOC femme healing collective) and the national climate justice group, Fierce Vulnerability Network. She offers therapy; facilitates groups and teaches workshops; and consults with organizations using restorative justice practices. She is member of an Asian Diaspora writing group and a co-editor on a forthcoming anthology titled Renewal. A snake by birth and in nature, she is always transforming, shedding, and growing into her next incarnation.
Santiago Iacinti, Collaborator
Santiago Iacinti (they/them) is a bilingual, gay, femme, nonbinary multi-disciplinary artist born in Mexico. They currently serve as the Associate Artistic Director and Director of Education at PlayPenn. Over the past three years at PlayPenn, Santi has produced developmental workshops for 29 new plays and counting. Santi was named a 2023 Kilroy Honoree; they were an inaugural member of the Roundabout Directors Group, a directing resident at Milwaukee Rep. They have also worked as a Casting Associate at X Casting NYC, a Sexual Harassment Prevention Trainer at ART/NY, and in Arts Engagement at The Old Globe. Some of the plays they have developed include: Trans World, Gente Del Sol, Pase Lo Que Pase, Bees & Honey. Their work is identity consciousness, and stages new futures for the marginalized communities they come from, both on and off stage.
Tara Moses, Dramaturg
Tara Moses is a citizen of Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, Mvskoke, director, multi award-winning playwright, dramaturg, and co-Founder of Groundwater Arts. She is the former Artistic Director in Residence at Red Eagle Soaring; a Cultural Capital Fellow with First Peoples Fund; fellow with the Intercultural Leadership Institute; advisory board member of Broadway for Racial Justice; member of the Directors Lab at Lincoln Center; recipient of the Thomas C. Fichandler Award; recipient of the 2025 Artistic Excellence Award with CompanyOne Theatre; Barbara Whitman Award finalist; associate member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society; and Dramatists Guild member. She is from the Muscogee Creek Reservation and holds a MFA in Directing from Brown/Trinity. www.taramoses.com
Taylor Reynolds, Director, The Waterfall
Taylor Reynolds is an OBIE-award winning director based in New York, originally from Chicago. Her work centers around joyful collaboration and new play development. Selected directing credits: Primary Trust (Signature Theatre), The Sensational Sea Mink-ettes (Woolly Mammoth), Fat Ham (Studio Theatre, Helen Hayes nom for Best Director), This Land Was Made (Vineyard Theatre), Clyde's (Berkeley Rep/Huntington Theatre), Tambo & Bones (Playwrights Horizons/CTG), Man Cave (Page 73), The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington (Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, New York Times Critic's Pick), and Plano (Clubbed Thumb, Drama Desk nom for Best Director). Taylor has also worked with companies including The Movement Theatre Company, Keen Company, Ojai Playwrights Conference, MCC, EST, and The 24 Hour Plays. She is a New Georges Affiliated Artist, 2021 LPTW Lucille Lortel Award recipient, 2017-2018 Clubbed Thumb Directing Fellow, and Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab alum.
Carol Ann Tan, Dramaturg
Carol Ann Tan is a Singapore-born director and dramaturg. She has worked with Court Theatre, Writers Theatre, TimeLine Theatre, Silk Road Rising, The Gift Theatre, Theater at Monmouth, Sideshow Theatre, First Floor Theater, PrideArts, The Comrades, SoloChicago Theatre, Haven Theatre, Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, Ma-Yi Theater, NYTW, and more. She is an artistic associate at Silk Road Rising and a 2017/18 Directors Inclusion Initiate at Victory Gardens, as well as a teaching artist for the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. MFA Directing: Brown/Trinity. carolanntan.com
Heather Helinsky, Dramaturg
Heather Helinsky (she/her) is a literary manager & freelance dramaturg based in Philadelphia. From 2019-2024, was the LM for Playwrights Foundation and the Jewish Plays Project, concurrently. She’s known for her community-centered anti-bias script reading practices, creating abundance over scarcity mindset, and deep care for the playwrights who applied. Thirteen years as a teaching artist for the Kennedy Center. Freelance work: Great Plains Theatre Conference & PlayPenn, & reader for Sundance, O’Neill, Seven Devils, and NNPN. Caridad Svich’s Guapa (2013), Tira Palmquist’s Two Degrees (2017), & Elana Dykewomon's final creative work, How to Let Your Lover Die (2022). In Pittsburgh (2008-2012), resident dramaturg at Pittsburgh Public and PICT, and was Visiting Assistant Professor for Carnegie Mellon's BFA dramaturgy training program. Training: M.F.A. in Dramaturgy from the A.R.T./Moscow Art/Harvard (’07) & the O’Neill Critics (’16). LMDA member since 2006, currently VP of Membership.
Phaedra Michelle Scott, Resident Dramaturg
Phaedra Michelle Scott is a dramaturg based in New York City. Phaedra is Resident Dramaturg of New Harmony Project and serves as a member of the Beehive Dramaturgy Studio (NYC). Selected credits include Audible Theater, American Ballet Theater, MCC Theater, New Victory, Playwrights Realm, Huntington Theater Company, Utah Shakespeare Festival, & Playwright’s Center. She is an alum of Youngblood with Ensemble Studio Theater, Pipeline’s PlayLab, and SPACE on Ryder Farm. She is a playwright, crocheter, horror enthusiast, obscure history fan and member of the Writers Guild of America. www.phaedrascott.com
