Meet the Creative Team

We’re honored today to get to introduce you to our miraculous creative team who are together moving mountains and transforming St. John’s Lutheran Church into the home of Beardo.

“The thing that excites me most about working on this project is the paradox between danger and safety. That paradox exists in the text, in the production, in every single layer…There will be physical risk, there will be emotional risk…By the time you leave you’re going ‘Oh my god, something actually happened here….’

I’m terrified. And I couldn’t be more excited.”

– Ellie Heyman, Director

Learn about the team below, and purchase those pre-sale tickets while supplies last!

Creative Team

Carolyn Mraz (Set Design) is a Brooklyn-based theatermaker. Favorite recent designs include: Porgy and Bess (Spoleto Festival USA), Afram ou La Belle Swita (Spoleto Festival USA), King Tot (Clubbed Thumb Summerworks, NYC), Wilderness (En Garde Arts, Abrons), I’ll Never Love Again (The Bushwick Starr, NYC), Charlatan (Ars Nova NYC), and The (*) Inn (Target Margin Theater, NYC). Carolyn is a proud Associated Artist of Target Margin Theater in Brooklyn and a company member of A Host of People in Detroit. She is also an educator, teaching at the University of New Haven, and has designed shows at Smith, Princeton, Brown, Manhattan School of Music, The New School, University of Kentucky, the University of Rochester, and the University of the Arts. Carolyn is an Oberlin College alum with an MFA in design from NYU Tisch.

Mary Ellen Stebbins (Lighting Design) Recent credits include Orpheus Unsung (Guthrie Theater), Cowboy Bob (Ars Nova), I’ll Never Love Again (Bushwick Starr), Opera Scenes (Manhattan School of Music), Jason Craig’s LongYarn (Bushwick Starr), and associate lighting design with Jane Cox for The Ambassador (BAM, UCLA). Selected credits: Gotham Chamber Opera, eighth blackbird, Princeton University, Monica Bill Barnes, Columbia Stages, Peabody Essex Museum, The New School, New Repertory Theatre, Bristol Valley Theater. Resident designer: thirdspace, HOWL ensemble, Encounters Ensemble. 2014 Live Design Young Designer to Watch, 2011 USITT Barbizon Lighting Design Award, 2009 Hangar Theatre Lab Company Design Fellow. MFA, Boston University; AB, Harvard College. www.maryellenstebbinsdesign.com

Katja Andreiev (costume design) designs costumes for theatre, opera, dance, performance art, and film, primarily in New York City where she has lived since attending NYU Tisch School of the Arts. She has interned at The Santa Fe Opera, and Parsons-Meares Ltd., and served as the first undergraduate teacher’s assistant and guest lecturer in NYU’s Theatre Studies department. After working for the Theater Development Fund Costume Collection for their final years in their Manhattan space, she now designs freelance and writes articles for theatrical publications including Stage Directions Magazine, and Theater Bay Area. Her primary areas of continuing study include Shakespeare and Chekhov, but she is also dedicated to contemporary performance, particularly new works that expand the boundaries of genre, and theatrical space. She has designed for art galleries and site specific performance art as well as for short films, music videos, and the occasional circus act. Due to a profound belief in education and theater as a teaching medium, she continues to design and serve as a teaching artist with high schools, acting studios, universities, and the children’s theater departments of professional theaters in addition to working to expand her professional repertoire.

Dan Moses Schreier (sound design) has designed sound and/or composed music for 52 broadway productions and many more for off and off off Broadway. recently Dan Moses designed the sound for Falsettos on Broadway and last summer composed the score for Dan Sullivan’s Troilus and Cressida at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. Dan Moses has received 4 Drama Desk Awards, 4 Tony Award nominations, and an OBIE Award for sustained excellence.

Joshua D. Reid (sound design): Broadway Associate Design credit selections include Falsettos, American Psycho, Act One, The Snow Geese, I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat with Sue Mengers, The Other Place, House of Blue Leaves, and Rain: A Tribute to the Beatles. Off-Broadway Sound Design & Associate Sound Design credits include Bandstand, Passion, Dogfight, Carrie, and over 80 additional regional and international productions. www.ReidSoundDesign.com

Jess Adams (props) is a props designer and artisan based in New York. Design credits include: Uncommon Sense (Upcoming, Tectonic Theater Project), Tectonic 25! (Tectonic), This Time (Rising Circle), The Gray Man (Pipeline at SoHo Rep), Couriers and Contrabands (TBG), The Electric Baby (Fordham), Cockfight (Fordham), WAKE (Columbia Stages). Broadway/Off-Broadway assistantships include: Othello (NYTW), Oslo (Lincoln Center), Falsettos (Broadway/Lincoln Center), Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Broadway/Roundabout), An American in Paris (National Tour), The King and I (National Tour). Jess earned a BA in Theater at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and returns to her home state during the summer to teach theater at the North Carolina Governor’s School (West Campus).

Rick and Jeff Kuperman (choreography) are a directing and choreography team for stage and screen. Recent choreography credits: Neverland, an immersive Peter Pan in Beijing (Broadway Asia), The Light Princess (American Repertory Theater/New Victory Theater, NY Times Critics’ Pick), Orpheus in the Berkshires (Williamstown Theater Festival), My Machine is Powered by Clocks (New Ohio/Dixon Place), and Hold Music (The Living Theater). Recent stage directing credits include Smile (FringeNYC), Roll! (Ars Nova), The 39 Steps (PST), and Dispossessed (HERE). For camera they’ve directed award-winning shorts and music videos that have screened at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, festivals around the world, and online at Entertainment Weekly, NPR, and The Huffington Post. The bros are grads of Harvard and Princeton, third degree black belts in Kenpo Karate, and love Russian literature.

Kristy Bodall (production stage manager) has been working with Pipeline since the summer of 2012, when she was the stage manager for Giant Killer Slugs. From there, she stage managed Clown Bar at both the Parkside Lounge and The Box before joining Pipeline’s staff – first as the Resident Stage Manager, and then as the Director of Production. Kristy has continued to stage manage for Pipeline since joining the staff, working on The Gray Man, Matchstick Series: Strange Tongues, and Playing Hot. Outside of Pipeline, Kristy works as a freelance stage manager, with recent credits including The Red Room (The Shelter), Material Witness (LaMaMa/Spiderwoman Theatre), When the Tanks Break (Drama League DirectorFest), Mermaiden; Or, The Monogamy (Spring Street Social Society), The Exalted (BAM Next Wave Festival), Together We Are Making A Poem in Honor of Life, Bull’s Hollow Part 2: The Princess Alaska (Ars Nova Project Residency), You on the Moors Now (Theatre Reconstruction Ensemble), War Lesbian (haunalee), and Melancholy Play (Strasburg Institute). Kristy also stage manages regularly for Gingold Theatrical Group’s reading series “Project Shaw”, Fresh Ground Pepper, and NYU’s Graduate Acting/Design program.

Jenny Beth Snyder (production manager) is a Tennessee born, New York based theater director, producer, production manager, and co-founder of theater company Fresh Ground Pepper NYC. Her most recent collaboration with the Shelter Theater company brought you the Red Room by Morgan McGuire. The show delves into questions of justice and how forgiveness has a place in the process. Her collaboration with True False Theater on Daria Tavana’s adaptation of Slaughterhouse Five played to sold out houses in the 2013 Fringe Festival and went on to the Encore Series. She collaborated with new playwright Jessica Hernandez on her innovative play regarding faith, commercialism and adulthood titled Man and Coconut in a residency with IRT. She braved the polar vortex in the outdoor, immersive cab show Take Me Home as assistant to Director Meghan Finn in the Incubator’s Arts Other Forces festival. Jenny Beth holds a BFA from NYU Tisch School of the arts. She is a member of the Lincoln Center Theater Director’s Lab in 2013.