David Feiner
Producing Artistic Director
david@aptpchicago.org
David co-founded Albany Park Theater Project in 1997 with his late wife, Laura Wiley, and served as APTP's co-director with Laura until her death in 2007. With Laura, David guided APTP from an idea to a nationally recognized, award-winning theater company. Under David and Laura's leadership, APTP received the Coming Up Taller Award from the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. Together, David and Laura were honored by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bah'a'is with the David Kellum Award, for acting as a positive role model and providing service and encouragement to youth of all races, and by Francis Park School with the Susan F. Berkowitz Award, for outstanding service to children and youth. David has directed or co-directed more than 25 original performance works at APTP, has been part of devising all of the company's performance works, and has produced all of its performances. David also leads APTP's fundraising efforts, securing more than $400,000 in contributed support each year from foundations, government agencies, corporations, and individual donors. David was born in New York City, lived for three years on an army base in Maryland while his father served as the base's physician, then spent the rest of his childhood in Middletown, New York. David's father, Fred, is an obstetrician/gynecologist, and his mother, Judy, was an interior decorator-but David attributes his creativity at least as much to his father, who has been an avid theater lover all his life and was drama counselor at Camp Balfour in upstate New York as a teenager. A showman since childhood, David got his start staging puppet shows he devised with his brother, Mark, featuring marionettes sewn for them by their mother. These were soon followed by revivals of classic Broadway musicals that David and Mark staged with their comprehensive collection of Star Wars action figures. As a high school student at Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut, David stayed behind the scenes as a props master, lighting designer (albeit a poor one), and, in his senior year, as a director for the first time. David majored in Theater Studies at Yale University, where he turned his focus to playwriting. After college, David earned a master's degree in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism from the Yale School of Drama. Before founding APTP, David worked as a dramaturg and archivist at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. and at Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, CT. David's artistic influences include the British theater ensemble, Complicite (for inventiveness that inspires a never-ending series of Aha! Moments); the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (for merging beauty, skill, and politics); the television shows, The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street (for character, intelligence, and gritty wit), and The West Wing (for idealism and sentiment); the band Talking Heads (for rapture); and the incomparable Laura Wiley, truly one of the contemporary masters of Chicago theater and performance.
Laura Wiley
Co-Founder
Aqui estoy. I am here because one grandfather, my Papa Norman, came as a child to the U.S. from Minsk through Ellis Island. Sick with a terrible cough, he was nearly turned away by immigration officials but fought to stay and grew up to create a successful carpet business-and my mom Janice. I am here because my other grandfather, Papa Joe, came to the U.S. from Vilna as Joseph Wilenski. As a teenager in the "new world" he was eager to help out his impoverished family, but faced relentless anti-Semitism in his job search. So he changed his last name to Wiley, the name he passed on to my dad Sylvan, the name I bear today ninety years later. I am here because my courageous great-grandparents-named Pinsky, Wilensky, Katz, and Cahn-chose to escape the pogroms of nineteenth century Eastern Europe. I am here because they settled in Chicago ready to work hard and dream hard. I don't imagine that their dreams specifically included having a great-granddaughter who would go to Tufts or to the Yale School of Drama, marry a boy from New York, or found a community-based theater company. But I hope they would consider the work I do as an artist and the dreams I envision for my APTP family an important part of the legacy they planned to leave. I dedicate my labor (of love) on all of Aqui Estoy to "Julio," who has given us all the gift of his artistry and friendship, as well as his story: may the future unfold in beauty for you as for all in our community.
Laura Wiley died on June 18, 2007. From time to time, we will change Laura's biography here on aptpchicago.org, using words that Laura herself wrote or remembrances of Laura written by APTP artists who worked with her. Laura wrote this biography for the program of the original production of Aqui Estoy in 2003.
Read more about Laura...
Maggie Popadiak
Associate Director
maggie@aptpchicago.org
Maggie Popadiak became APTP's Associate Director at the beginning of 2007, after a year and a half as Company Manager. As Associate Director, Maggie is part of the artistic team that directs the ensemble's stage work; she also leads the company's ethnographic work, is co-coordinator of the college counseling program that APTP offers its teen artists, and facilitates workshops in performance skills. Maggie first arrived at APTP, though, on April 1, 1998, as an ensemble member, when she was a fourteen year-old freshman at Roosevelt High School. Maggie was part of devising all of the company's original performance works between 1998 and 2001, and as an actor she performed the life stories of more than 20 people, including memorable roles in Graduation Day, After Michael, Princess Camilla, Linda Nicaragua, and Huy Time (a lead role that Maggie learned overnight to replace another actor 24 hours before opening). Maggie saw her own life portrayed on the APTP stage, first in the 1999 piece, Nightmare, and then again in the 2002 piece, Home Maid (as told by her younger sister, Marta, also an APTP alumna). Maggie's work on Jihad made her the first ensemble member to assistant direct an APTP piece, and she was also one of the first ensemble members to serve on the Board of Directors. During her senior year of high school, Maggie was among the first ensemble members to go through APTP's college counseling program. This process took Maggie to The College of Wooster in Ohio, where she became the first in her family to earn a college degree. At Wooster, Maggie majored in sociology, worked for four years in the Office of Admissions, studied for a semester in Poland, assisted a professor in research on young, incarcerated fathers, and wrote a senior thesis about immigrant Polish women working as domestics in Chicago.
Colby Beserra
Resident Director
colby@aptpchicago.org
Colby Beserra became Resident Director in 2009 after serving as Music Director since 2001. In that time, he has facilitated the creation of original music for all of APTP's work, including Huy Time, in which Micah Bezold (an alumnus of both the ensemble and staff) played a score composed on more than 20 percussion instruments; The Love Is Strong, for which APTP actors re-created a 60's Mexican pop band; and Saffron, which featured a Persian-inspired score performed by Mareva Lindo on oud and Ana Ovando on tonbak and daf, and an original corrido that told the story of a restaurant busboy. With Micah, Colby composed the score of God's Work, named one of the best theater productions of 2006 by Hedy Weiss in the Chicago Sun-Times. Colby and Micah also serve as the curators of The $5 Renaissance. After graduating from Northwestern University with a B.S. in theater, Colby was selected as the first Director of the Vittum Theater, a 300-seat, state-of-the-art theater space opened by the Northwestern University Settlement House in 1998. In more than five years at the Vittum, Colby helped lay a foundation of arts programming dedicated to providing Chicago's schools, students, and teachers with rich and valuable arts experiences, as well as exposure to high-quality theater for young audiences. (The Vittum's own company, Adventure Stage, was named Outstanding New Children's Theatre Company by the American Alliance for Theatre and Education in 2007.) In addition to writing and performing his own music throughout Chicago, Colby is the co-owner of Great Life Music (www.greatlifemusic.com), a company focused on providing live and recorded music across a number of industries, environments, and media platforms. Through GLM, Colby writes, arranges, and produces original music and serves as bandleader for The Party Faithful, a 10-piece dance band that performs at private events in Chicago and across the country. As a co-production between Great Life Music and Chicago Public Radio, he serves as the Music Director for WBEZ's "Under Cover" series on Eight Forty-Eight. In other theater work, Colby, along with long-time collaborator Matt Reed, wrote, produced, and performed the score for The Jenkins Farm Project, a dance installation created by his wife Annie Beserra which will receive it's second production in the summer of 2008. He was the Music Director, one of three composers, and played the part of Oberon in Striding Lion InterArts Workshop's adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream (called Ill Met By Moonlight) in 2004. He also served as Co-Music Director, actor, and singer in the Frank Zappa-inspired piece Billy The Mountain and Other Wartime Stories at the Elbo Room in 2005, and at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2006. Colby is a two-time grant recipient from the American Composers Forum and has produced original music and played on projects for artists such as Simbryt Whittington, Jason Berger, Dan Lipton, Matt Reed, Matt Lenny, and Andrea Amos. Through Great Life Music, Colby has contributed original music to Senator Barack Obama's website for his 2008 presidential campaign. Selections from Colby's self-titled album and Jukebox Saloon, a collaboration with pianist Dan Lipton, can be heard at http://www.colbybeserra.com
Rossana Rodríguez Sánchez
Associate Artist
rossana@aptpchicago.org
I was working as a drama teacher at a public school in Puerto Rico when I decided it was time for a change. Through the wonders of the Intertubes, I found out about a Chicago theater company doing exciting work with teens on Chicago’s northwest side, and a few months later, I was booking a flight, packing my suitcase and starting a new life. I learned about the intersection of art and community very early in life. It was the air I breathed, the food I ate. My father Luis is a community leader and poet (unpublished, like all poet-geniuses, of course!). He filled our house with the music and poetry of Latin America and Spain—Neruda, Joan Manuel Serrat, Silvio Rodríguez, Pablo Milanés, Alí Primera, Mercedes Sosa, among many others. Born and raised in a U.S. colony, my father also taught us about resistance in the face of oppression and injustice. My brothers and I started singing when we were young and we never stopped. Together, we started writing and performing original music, and the modest venues we played helped me put myself through school at the University of Puerto Rico. We ended up being really good ( I believe we have to thank our mom for our musical talent, she is a great singer but doesn't really know it) and travelled to a few countries to perform, such as Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Also together, with other singer songwriters, we developed a cooperative Theater Cafe where we could have our own venue to play our music. Singing with my brothers is my favorite activity – both of them are amazing musicians. At the University of Puerto Rico, I studied social work, sociology and various other subjects, but nothing made my pulse leap like theater—learning about it, teaching it, making it and living it. After joining the University's traveling theater company, I met Rosa Luisa Marquéz, a professor of theater who became my teacher and mentor. From Rosa, I learned about the Theater of the Oppressed, which showed me how to marry theater and resistance, poetry and politics, both in concept and practice. Before long, I found myself in Ecuador participating in workshops and performing with the Malayerba Theater Company. Later I went to Brazil to study with Augusto Boal, the founder of the Theater of the Oppressed. After Brazil, I left behind the beaches and blue seas that surround Puerto Rico for the chilly (or so I thought at the time) town of Manchester, England, where I received a Masters degree in Applied and Social Theatre. But Manchester can’t hold a candle (or an icicle) to Chicago’s frosty winters. Adjusting to my new climate has been a challenge, but joining APTP hasn’t required any effort at all. I feel like I’ve finally found the theater family I always knew was out there, waiting for me to join it.