DPA - Theatre and Music Theatre Faculty

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Carl Menninger
Assistant Professor, Program Director, Theatre, Music Theatre and Dance
PHONE: 202.885.3414 E-MAIL: menninge@american.edu

Carl Menninger is the director of Theatre/Music Theatre at American University . He holds a master's degree from Emerson College and a bachelor's from Northwestern University . While in Boston , he taught at Berklee College of Music. In addition, he's worked in high schools in Boston and Chicago and professional training programs in Washington and Chicago. As a director and playwright, Menninger worked in numerous theatres in Boston and Chicago . He has directed and/or choreographed over 150 productions. His playwriting credits include: Objects in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, For Real, And So She Moved In, Private Life: Your Fifteen Minutes, and the book for the musical, A Pocket Full of Grace which is currently under development in collaboration with Ford’s Theatre At American University, Carl directed productions of Into the Woods and Happy.Go.Lucky as well as staged readings of his own works. Acting credits include: Zach in A Chorus Line, Brian in The Shadow Box, and Doctor Moulineaux in A Gown for His Mistress and most recently, Cat on the Rails.

Cara Gabriel
Assistant Professor
PHONE: 202.885.3410 E-MAIL: cgabriel@american.edu

Dr. Cara Gabriel teaches such classes as Fundamentals of Acting; Principles, Plays and Performance; Reflections of American Society on Stage and Screen, Theatre History, and Senior Capstone. She received her bachelor's degrees in theatre and political science from Middlebury College, her master's degree in theatre with concentrations in performance and theatre for young audiences at Northwestern University, and her doctorate in theatre with a concentration in directing from the University of Michigan. She was also a member of the first class to leave the University of Michigan with a certificate from the Center for World Performance Studies. Dr. Gabriel's dissertation research was on the variedad, or Spanish-language vaudeville, for which she spent two summers doing grant-sponsored research in Mexico and Texas. While attending school at the University of Michigan, Gabriel directed such works as The Possibilities, Dream of a Common Language, The Fall of the House of Usher, and Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi. Gabriel has also directed original works for the theatre at the Performance Network in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and two of her own Shakespearean adaptations for children: The Tempest in a tour of central Vermont and A Midsummer Night's Dream for the Northwestern Children's Theatre Tour. She also served as part of an arts education assessment team on the New York State Task Force for the Theatre Arts Assessment Exam. The task force was a Goals 2000 initiative that sponsored curriculum assessment and development for the performing arts in New York State. At American University, Gabriel has directed Caleen Sinnette Jennings' one act To Be or Want to Be, the 2002 and 2003 Senior Capstone projects, Our Country's Good, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Cherry Sisters Revisited and PERF 101: First Year/Transfer Showcase. She has also choreographed Much Ado About Nothing and PERF 101. Dr. Gabriel regularly writes study guides for the Ford's Theatre educational outreach program. In the DC area she has also worked with the Potomac Theatre Project at the Olney Theatre Center, and Discovery Theatre at the Smithsonian Institution.

Gail Humphries Mardirosian
Associate Professor, Department Chair
PHONE: 202.885.3429 E-MAIL: ghumphr@american.edu

Dr. Gail Humphries Mardirosian is the Chair of the Department of Performing Arts at the American University, where she is now in her 25th year as a professor of theatre. While at American, Gail received Awards for Outstanding Service to the University community, the Outstanding Teaching Award for the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Outstanding Teaching Award from Alpha Chi Omega. She will be implementing a Fulbright Scholar Award for the 08-09 academic year, teaching at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, Czech Republic. To date, she has directed a total of 106 productions, including musicals, serious dramas, the classics and children's theatre, in varied venues throughout the United States. She is particularly interested in cross-disciplinary instruction K-16. She founded Imagination Quest (IQ) over 10 years ago as an arts-integration curriculum, teacher training and research project.

She is also interested in international theatre. She has presented papers and productions in various countries. In the spring semester 2007, she directed American University students in a new English translation of Three Sisters performed at the Embassy of the Czech Republic and is presenting a paper on this production in fall, 08 at the Catholic University in Ruzomberok, Slovokia. Last fall Gail directed American University students in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, performed at the 7th International Festival of the Volkov Theatre in Yaroslavl, Russia. During summer 2006, she presented a paper entitled "Another American Voicing of the Theatre of Josef Topol" at the University of the South, in Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic. In summer 2005, she participated in an international symposium in Delphi, Greece where she presented a paper entitled "Parallel Power: Periklean Athens and Antigone from Page to Stage at American University." Gail has developed and presented nearly 100 master classes and workshops all over the United States including recent presentations at the Florida Association of Theatre Educator's conference (In Search of Shakespeare), the New England Theatre Conference (Teach to Reach: Arts Based Teaching and Learning), and at Brown University's No Teacher Left Behind Conference (Learning to Read, Reading to Learn). Gail is also an arts education consultant and has served numerous non-profit performing arts organizations in that capacity.

Gail's publications include: "Transforming the Classroom Teacher Into a Teaching Artist" in the summer 2007 issue of Teaching Artist Journal, an e-journal article entitled "The Quest to Captivate Hearts and Minds in the Classroom: Teaching to Reach and Foster Creativity and Giftedness in Children" at www.TheatroEdu.gr, "The Theatre of Psychology, the Psychology of Theatre" in the Journal of Teaching Psychology, "An American Voicing of the Silenced Theatre of Josef Topol" for the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences, and an article for the International Journal of Learning entitled "Literacy Learning for At-Risk Students Through Arts-Based Instruction" focusing on a case study of the Imagination Quest project. She has just started work on a book entitled A PEDAGOGY FOR THE CRITICAL IMAGINATION: THE ARTS AS A PATHWAY TO SUCCESS IN LEARNING K-16.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings
Professor
PHONE: 202.885.3430 E-MAIL: cjennin@american.edu

Caleen Sinnette Jennings is a playwright and performer. Her play Inns and Outs was a recipient of a $10,000 grant from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, and was a 1999 nominee for the Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding New Play. Her play Playing Juliet/Casting Othello was produced at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 1998 and was a nominee for the Charles MacArthur Award that year. Professor Jennings has received the Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival Meritorious Achievement Award in Directing for productions of The Dining Room and Rashomon. She is a faculty member of the Folger Shakespeare Library's Summer Teaching Shakespeare Institute. She has performed original work at the National Air and Space Museum, The National Press Club, and Andrews Air Force Base. She has been an active member of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and an adjudicator for the American College Theatre Festival and for Washington, D.C.'s Helen Hayes Awards. Dramatic Publishing Company has published Inns and Outs, Playing Juliet/Casting Othello, Free Like Br'er Rabbit, and Sunday Dinner. New Plays, Inc. has published A Lunch Line and Same But Different.

Karl Kippola
Assistant Professor
PHONE: 202.885.3464 E-MAIL: kippola@american.edu

Karl Kippola holds a BA in drama from the University of Montana, an MFA in acting from Wayne State University in Detroit, and a PhD in theatre from the University of Maryland. As an actor, director, choreographer, adapter, and dialect coach, Kippola has been involved in well over a hundred productions throughout the country. Locally, he has worked with Everyman Theatre, Rep Stage, Olney Theatre, Baltimore Shakespeare, Virginia Shakespeare, Bay Theatre, Imagination Stage, Metro Stage, Round House, Center Company, Firebelly, Ford’s Theatre, and the Shakespeare Theatre. In his five years at American University, he has directed and choreographed Kiss Me, Kate; Of Thee I Sing; and The Mystery of Edwin Drood; and directed a gender-reversed Hamlet. This year he acted in the faculty production of Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden (directed by Gail Humphries-Mardirosian) and directed and choreographed Urinetown, as well as the Senior Capstone. He has delivered papers at several conferences and has published articles in the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Theatre Symposium, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, and the current edition of Theatre History Studies. His research focuses on the performance of masculinity on the nineteenth-century American stage.

Department of Performing Arts, College of Arts and Sciences, American University
4400 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20016-8053 [phone] 202-885-3420 [fax] 202-885-1092

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