Visual Playwrights Retreat

Expert biographies

PETER COOK
Peter S. Cook is an internationally reputed Deaf performing artist whose works incorporates American Sign Language, pantomime, storytelling, acting, and movement.

He has traveled extensively around the country and aboard with Flying Words Project to promote ASL Literature with Kenny Lerner since 1986. Peter has appeared in Live from Off Center’s "Words on Mouth" (PBS) and "United States of Poetry" (PBS) produced by Emmy winner Bob Holman. He has taught at Columbia College where he received the 1997 Excellence in Teaching award. In 1998, Peter set up a video production called PC Production and now based in Chicago.
Peter was featured at the National Storytelling festival in Jonesboro, Tenn., The Winter tales in Oklahoma City, Illinois storytelling Festival, Hoosier Storytelling Festival, the Multi-Cultural Festival in Eugene, Ore, and the Tales of Graz in Graz, Austria, The Deaf Way II in Washington, D.C. Peter has worked with Deaf storytellers/poets in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Japan.

The highlight of 2003 was that Peter was invited to the White House to join the National Book Festival.

Peter lives in Chicago and teaches at Purdue University. He loves to tell stories to his son.

JUANITA ROCKWELL
Juanita Rockwell is a director, writer, dramaturge, performer, and producer with over 20 years experience developing new works for theatre, opera, radio and multi-media. She is also Founder and Co- Director of Towson University's MFA in Theatre, an interdisciplinary graduate program training the artist-as-producer of original experimental projects.

She is currently writing a play in collaboration with Tibetan Rinpoche Tenzin Wangyal and writing a book on contemporary experimental performance in a context of Buddhist practice. She directed the workshop premiere of The Sound of Waves: A Prayer Cycle, a music theatre piece by Donna DiNovelli/David Rodwin, for Mabou Mines/Suite Resident Artists program. She was Co-Director (w/ Steve O’Hearn and Jackie Dempsey) of Squonk Opera’s multi-media production Burn, which premiered at Pittsburgh’s City Theatre and toured nationally as Inferno. She wrote/directed/co-designed A Cave in the Sky, also a work with puppets, performers, and video, for The Artists at St. Ann’s Puppetlab at The Culture Project in New York City with her husband; musician, sound and video designer Chas Marsh.

As a writer, Rockwell collaborates with choreographers, directors, and composers. She wrote the book and libretto for Waterwalk: Surface and Depth in collaboration with Nancy Romita/The Moving Company, and composer Robert Macht's gamelan orchestra, performed on a permanent stone labyrinth constructed for the premiere at Johns Hopkins Bayview Hospital in Baltimore. She also wrote Lunar Pantoum (For Tibet) for Romita’s company, performed at the Maryland Institute College of Art. In collaboration with her grad students at Towson University, she co-wrote Iago’s Plot and For Love for Director Shozo Sato and has been writer-in-residence at the O'Neill Theatre Center's National Theatre Institute.

For six years, Rockwell was Artistic Director of Company One Theater, a professional regional theater in Hartford, CT, that premiered dozens of new works for stage and radio. In 1994, she wrote the libretto and directed The World is Round, an opera by James Sellars. Other professional premieres she directed at Company One include early works by Elizabeth Egloff, Charles Borkhuis, Donna DiNovelli, Rachel Sheinkin, and Pulitzer winners Paula Vogel and Suzan-Lori Parks.
Other productions she has directed include Moliére's The Misanthrope (Blue Heron Theatre, NYC), Beckett's Play (Washington Project for the Arts, DC), Fierstein's Safe Sex (Source Theatre, DC), Moliére's Learned Ladies (Jorgenson Theater, CT) and James Sellars' music theater pieces Chanson Dada (Sao Paulo, Brazil) and For Love of the Double Bass (Madrid, Helsinki, Yorkshire).

Rockwell's international projects over the past 10 years have focused on the MFA in Theatre Program that she founded in 1994, often working in collaboration with Philip Arnoult and the Center for International Theatre Development. The Three Continents Project she coordinated in Warsaw, working with artists from Poland and East Africa, was recently featured in American Theatre Magazine. The MFA program has established working relationships with artists and organizations in Egypt (where Shozo Sato's Iago's Plot won Critic's Choice for Best Director in The Cairo International Experimental Theatre Festival) as well as in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Israel, The Netherlands, Germany, Japan, and Indonesia.

At Towson, Rockwell directed Caridad Svich's Alchemy of Desire/Dead Man's Blues, José Rivera's Marisol, Marlane Meyer's Etta Jenks and Tony Kushner's The Illusion, as well as premiere productions of Donna DiNovelli's The First Eff, and Willy Conley's Falling on Hearing Eyes, which was then featured at the 1998 International Deaf Theatre Conference. As Co-Director of the January 2000 ITI/TCG Conference: International Origins for New Theatre Practice, she led an international gathering of professionals in a discussion of new paradigms for theatre training and performance practice.

Rockwell has also worked extensively in radio, serving on the Artistic Board of The Radio Stage at WNYC, NY, for whom she directed Charles Borkhuis’ The Sound of Fear Clapping. She founded Company One's RadioPlaying Series in 1989, working with Firesign Theatre’s David Ossman on its first production and directing sixteen pieces in the series. She most recently directed Charles Borkhuis’ Foreign Bodies for National Public Radio.

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Colorado College with a BA in Semiotics and Theatre, Honors in Linguistics. Her MFA in Directing is from the University of Connecticut, where she received the Hinkel Award for Excellence. She worked as a theatre/film reviewer, stage actor, and street performer; sang jazz in clubs around the country; and has taught at the University of Connecticut, Trinity College, Hartt School of Music, University of Hartford.

ERIC BEATTY
Eric Beatty has been Director of Homewood Arts Programs at Johns Hopkins University since 2000.

Eric received his MFA in Theatre Arts from Towson University where he was also an adjunct professor in the Theatre Department for 4 years, teaching acting, mime, and original ensemble theatre. He has taught theatre classes and directed at Lehigh University and led workshops at numerous colleges and theatres on the East coast.

He was a member of Touchstone Theatre, in Bethlehem, PA for six years, where he was an actor, writer, director and administrator. For three years he performed with Mummenschanz, the Swiss Mime-Mask Theatre Company, both on Broadway and on US and International tours. He has worked in theatres and film and on television in Boston, NYC and Baltimore. His undergraduate degree is in Comparative Literature, from Dartmouth College. For the past six years, Eric has written and toured two original solo plays for children, and he is currently developing his third: Are we there yet? Geographic tales from the American road.

He lives in the Baltimore area, with his wife and three children.