Conservatory for Actors Faculty

Conservatory for Actors Faculty Bios

Director

Blake Hackler

A two-time Fulbright Scholar, Blake Hackler has appeared in productions on Broadway, Off-Broadway and in regional theatres throughout the country. In New York, he worked with theatres including Playwrights Horizons, York Theatre, The Ohio, and Roundabout, as well as creating the role of Moritz Stiefel in the original New York workshop of the Tony-award winning musical Spring Awakening. In Dallas, Hackler is a member of the Brierley Resident Acting Company at the Tony Award-winning Dallas Theater Center. He is the current chair of theater at Southern Methodist University and has also taught at LaSalle College of the Arts in Singapore, New Bulgarian University, Roosevelt University, AMDA, the National Theatre Workshop for the Handicapped, and through the Kennedy Center as an Artist in Residence. As a playwright, Hackler’s work has been seen across the U.S. He is a lifetime member of the esteemed BMI/Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Writing Workshop and was the 2009 recipient of the Harrington Award for Excellence in Musical Theatre Writing. MFA Yale School of Drama.

Faculty

Will Cobbs

Will's most recent theater credits include Raisin in the Sun (Arena Stage), Safe House (Repertory Theatre of St. Louis), When I Come to Die (Kansas City Repertory), Autumn’s Harvest (Lincoln Center), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Scarlett Johannson (Broadway) . He has also appeared on Elementary, Madam Secretary, Army Wives, The Goodwife, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and The Night Of. Will holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Drama.

Brad Heberlee

Most recently appeared in Make Believe at Second Stage and Mrs. Murray’s Menagerie with The Mad Ones at Ars Nova. Off-Broadway: A Life (Playwrights Horizons), Small Mouth Sounds (Ars Nova), Peter Pan (Bedlam), These Paper Bullets! (The Atlantic), This Beautiful City (The Vineyard/Civilians), Vanity Fair, The Bald Soprano (The Pearl), The Thugs (SoHo Rep). Regional: Hartford Stage, Yale Rep, The Geffen Playhouse, Center Theatre Group, Actors Theatre of Louisville, ART, The Huntington, Denver Center, Center Stage Baltimore. Television: “Interview With The Vampire”, “Law and Order”, “Evil”, “Madam Secretary”, “White Collar”, “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”. Education: Yale School of Drama.

Gabriel Levey

Gabriel Levey is an actor, teacher, theatre maker, Artistic Director of Completely Ridiculous Productions and head of the Completely Ridiculous Training Center - offering classes online and in person to folks all over the world. Gabe teaches Clown, Physical Acting and Shakespeare at NYU, and Acting as Play at The Pandemonium Studio, which he co-founded with his mentor of the past 14 years, Christopher Bayes (Head of Movement at The David Geffen School of Drama at Yale). As a private coach, Gabe specializes in graduate school audition prep. So far Gabe has helped his clients get accepted to the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, Juilliard, NYU Grad Acting, Columbia, CalArts, UCSD, Brown, RADA, Guildhall, Central Speech and Drama, and LAMDA among others. As an acting coach in film and television Gabe has most recently worked on Jurassic Park Dominion, Archive 81 (Netflix) and Physical (AppleTV). A maker of theatrical comedy, Gabe's original work includes, Dwellicle 109 (IRT); Brainsongs, or the play about the dinosaur farm (Yale Cabaret); And now we do LINDBERGH’S FLIGHT by Bertolt Brecht (Yale Cabaret); The Most Beautiful Thing in the World (Yale Cabaret/Boston University/Cloud City); How to Help the Self Needs Help, with Carol A. Jantsen (The Peoples Improv Theater/Apple Podcasts); and most recently A Super Serious and Not at All Funny Reading of Stories I Wrote After Brain Surgery, which kicked off Completely Ridiculous Productions first season of new work at the Northampton Center for the Arts. BFA, Boston University. MFA, David Geffen School of Drama at Yale.

Stephanie Machado

Website: http://www.stephaniemachado.me

Stephanie Machado (she/her) is a first-generation Brazilian-American actor, director, and educator based in NYC. She holds an MFA in Acting from Yale School of Drama, and a BFA in Acting from Southern Methodist University. Stephanie is an adjunct professor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, AMDA College in NYC, and has been teaching at the Yale Summer Conservatory for Actors for the past six years. She has appeared onstage at Yale Repertory Theater, Actors Theater of Louisville, Classic Stage Company, Portland Stage Company, Denver Center, Repertory Theater of St. Louis, Fiasco Theater, McCarter Theater, and Cleveland Playhouse, among others. Recent directing credits include Ni Mi Madre at Rattlestick Theater (Assistant Director to Danilo Gambini), The Great Divide at Emerging Artists Theater, Inside The Wild Heart at Group.BR (Assistant Director to Linda Wise), and The Meal: Dramatic Essays on Cannibalism at Yale Cabaret. She is a recipient of the Olivier Thorndike Award in Acting from Yale and the Greer Garson Award in Acting from SMU, and is a Jerome L. Greene Fellow. She has undergone extensive EDI training with Arts Equity and is trained in the Liz Lerman Critical Response method.

Dana Tanner-Kennedy

Dana is a scholar, dramaturg, and doctoral candidate at the Yale School of Drama, where she also earned her MFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism. Dana currently teaches in the Department of Drama at the University of Alberta and the Summer Conservatory for Actors at Yale University, and she serves as the Managing Editor of the Marginalia Review of Books. Her professional dramaturgy credits include The Soldier’s Tale (Carnegie Hall); Hamlet (Yale Repertory Theatre); Urge for Going (The Public Theater); Suddenly Last Summer, Loot, Nora, and Appropriate (Westport Country Playhouse, CT); Psychos Never Dream (by National Book Award-winner Denis Johnson, Kitchen Dog Theater, Dallas). She is a former Literary Associate for Yale Rep and a former Managing Editor of Theater magazine. Dana spent five seasons in the education department at Dallas Theater Center, serving as Associate Director for two, and worked in the literary offices of Atlantic Theater Company and The Public Theater.

Kara Lynn Vaeni

Kara-Lynn Vaeni is a theatre and opera director who focuses on highly theatrical, impossible-to-stage works by diverse and interesting writers who are often women or artists of color. She recently won an NEA grant for her play SHAPE, a weightlifting play, which she directed in its world premiere at The Kitchen Theatre in NY in 2021. SHAPE was also named to the Kilroy’s list. Her play In Search of the Sublime also premiered in 2021 under her direction at Stage West Theatre in DFW. In 2020 she was named The Best Director in Dallas by the Dallas Observer and she has the trophy to prove it. She has directed productions and workshops at HERE Art Center, New York; BAM Harvey Theater, Brooklyn; the Irondale, Brooklyn; The National Theatre of Prague; Guggenheim Works & Process, New York; New Georges, New York; 2g, New York; The Flea, New York; the wild project, New York; WP Theatre, New York; Dallas Theatre Center; Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, Conn.; Montana Repertory Theatre, Missoula, Mont.; and the Maltz Jupiter Theatre, Jupiter, Fla. She is an Assistant Professor of Acting at Southern Methodist University. She is a proud member of the Society of Directors and Choreographers.

Evan Yionoulis

Evan Yionoulis is an Obie Award-winning theatre director who has directed new plays and classics in New York, across the country, and internationally. She is Professor in the Practice of Acting and Directing at Yale School of Drama, where she has taught for the past twenty years, and a resident director at Yale Repertory Theatre.

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