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Kim Peter Kovac
Kim Peter Kovac has worked at the John F. Kennedy Center for the
Performing Arts in Washington, DC, since 1983 and is presently Producing
Director of Kennedy Center Theater for Young Audiences, which commissions,
produces, tours, and presents performances for young people and families.His
work at the Center has included serving as producer of over fifty new plays,
operas and dances for young audiences and co-founding director of the Kennedy
Center’s New Visions/New Voices program, which has assisted in the development
of 80 new plays, musicals, and operas from 72 playwrights and32 composers
working with 51 US and 7 international theater companies. The program has been
honored by both the American Alliance for Theater in Education and the Children’s
Theater Foundation for outstanding service to the field.
He has worked as a producer, director, designer, and playwright
for theater, opera, and dance, has served on panels for the National Endowment
for the Arts and TCG and taught seminars on ‘The Business of New Play
Development’ and ‘International TYA’ for graduate students at the University of
Central Florida, where he is a Graduate Faculty Scholar. He is has been on the
governing board since 2002 and is currently serving his second term as vice president
of ASSITEJ, the international association of theaters for young people and
families, with national centers in over 80 countries. Since 1998, he has been
on the board of Theater for Young Audiences/USA, and was president from
2004-2008. He has been a member of the board of IPAY, International Performing
Arts for Youth, since 2010.In May 2011 he co-founded ‘Write Local. Play
Global’, an international network for playwrights for young audiences, which
presently has over 375 members in 52 countries. In 2008, both International
Performing Arts for Youth (IPAY) and American Alliance for Theater in Education
(AATE) honored him for long-time distinguished service to the field. He has an
MFA in directing from the University of Texas at Austin.
Deirdre Kelly Lavrakas
Deirdre Kelly Lavrakas is presently Production Operations
Manager and a teaching artist with the John F. Kennedy Center for the
Performing Arts in Washington, DC. With a MFA in acting from George Washington
University, Ms. Lavrakas founded and directed the Theater Training Program for
Young People at the Kennedy Center, and is co-founding director of New
Visions/New Voices, the Center’s award-winning new play development program
which has assisted in the development of 80 new plays, musicals, and operas
from 72 playwrights and 32 composers working with 51 U.S. and 7 international
theater companies. Teaching highlights include residencies in Israel,
Palestine, Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Thailand, and she
adapted her Kennedy Center theater training curriculum to help create the only
theater training program for children and young people in the Arab Middle East,
at the Performing Arts Center in Amman. In May 2011, she co-founded Write
Local. Play Global, an international network for theater for young audiences
playwrights, which currently has 375 members in 52 countries.
Directing highlights include: A Broadway Songbook and
Fascinating Rhythms, commissioned for a seven-week US State Department tour of
six South Asian countries,and Michael Nyman’s opera The Man Who Mistook His
Wife for a Hat. Favorite Kennedy Center projects include the conception,
development, and direction of Walking the Winds: American Tales and Walking the
Winds: Arabian Tales, (a co-production
with the Performing Arts Center of Amman, Jordan), both of which
used folktales and traditional songsShe recently directed the rock opera
Grotesque Arabesque and Echo and Dorian by Diane Samuels for the New Plays for
Young Audiences program at the Provincetown Playhouse at New York University,
where she will direct D.W. Gregory’s Salvation Road in June. In March 2012 she
travelled to Manama, Bahrain, as Tour General Manager for the Kennedy Center
Theater for Young Audiences production of Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Musical,
where she also, as coordinated with the Ministry of Education, taught children,
high school teachers, and students and faculty at the University of Bahrain.
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