Professor Margaret Laurena Kemp, theatre and dance department chair, is pleased to announce the Granada Artists-in-Residence for 2024 which includes an internationally acclaimed alumnus. 

Scott Ebersold, who directs The Laramie Project in winter quarter, is a theatre director and former artistic associate of Off-Broadway’s Classic Stage Company in New York. Ebersold recently directed the Off-Broadway premiere of Max Vernon’s new musical The View UpStairs that was nominated for two Lucille Lortel Awards, three Drama Desk Awards, an Off-Broadway Alliance Award for Best Musical for which Audelco/The Viv nominated him for a Best Director. His other directing credits include: Charles L. Mee’s Imperial Dreams at Classic Stage Company, Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day for Columbia Stages at the Connelly Theater, Rare Birds by Adam Szymkowicz, Small Steps by Briandaniel Oglesby, a native of Davis, at Portland Center Stage’s JAW Festival. Small Steps was previously presented online as part of Catalyst: A Theatre Think Tank through the UC Davis Department of Theatre and Dance in 2021. 

Alumnus Dahlak Brathwaite (B.A., English and theatre and dance, ’08) returns to UC Davis for a five-week workshop developing a new hip-hop musical performance piece in winter quarter. Since launching onto the national spoken word scene by appearing on the last two seasons of HBO’s Russell Simmons’ presents Def Poetry Jam, Brathwaite has showcased his seamless blend of hip-hop, theatre, and spoken word at over 100 universities throughout the United States and Europe, SXSW, Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Smithsonian, Ars Nova, and Off-Broadway in New York. His latest work, Try/Step/Trip, was created in collaboration with legendary director Roberta Uno and premiered in February 2020 at Dance Mission in San Francisco and was supported by The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, CalArts, and Victory Gardens. Recently, Dahlak was nominated for the 2019 United States Artists Fellowship and was awarded NEFA’s National Theatre Project Grant.  

Irish theatre director and acting teacher Sinéad Rushe returns to UC Davis to collaborate with Kemp on a production of Thornton Wilder’s American masterpiece Our Town in spring. Rushe and Kemp’s previous project AntigoneNOW, produced online at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, was screened worldwide including an invited presentation at the Egypt International Experimental Theatre Festival. Rushe is the author of Michael Chekhov’s Acting Technique: A Practitioner’s Guide, co-translator into French of four plays by Howard Barker and was senior lecturer in acting and movement at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. She directed Concert, which was performed at The Pit at London’s Barbican and New York’s Baryshnikov Arts Center and on international tour winning a Gradam Comharcheoil TG4 2018 Award and a Bessie Award nomination in New York. In fall 2023 she becomes lead acting tutor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA).  

Launched in 1982, the UC Davis Granada Artist-in-Residence program is unique in American university theater, bringing prominent theater artists—directors, playwrights, or choreographers—to Davis each academic quarter to teach and create a work for public performance. A special opportunity for graduate and undergraduate students to work closely with major theater and dance practitioners, it is a unique cross-cultural experience.

The Department of Theatre and Dance is part of the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis. For information about other department productions, visit arts.ucdavis.edu/theatre-and-dance.