About Fort Point Theatre Channel

Fort Point Theatre Channel is dedicated to creating and sustaining new configurations of the performing arts. We bring together an ensemble of artists from the worlds of theater, music, visual arts, and everything in between as a forum for collaborative expression while enriching the Fort Point community, Boston, and beyond.

Fort Point Theatre Channel, resident at Midway Studios, is comprised of a core group of artists: Rick Dorff, Mary Driscoll, Christie Lee Gibson, Silvia Graziano, Anne Loyer, Marc S. Miller, Sally Nutt, Hana Pegrimkova, Amanda Sheehan, Robin Smith, Nick Thorkelson, Douglas Urbank, Daniel J. van Ackere, and Mark Warhol. Together with many collaborators, we offer:

• Unique Major Productions and New Play Festivals,
• Salons that bring artists and others together to explore ideas for future creative ventures, and 
• The Exclamation Point! reading series, informal gatherings that introduce and explore new works, often in draft form, joining short plays, poetry, and fiction with music, video, and other media.

Rick Dorff

Photo coming

Richard Dorff is a visual artist. He attended Massachusetts College of Art and currently works in his studio in East Boston. He is a founding member of the Atlantic Works Gallery where he shows his work.

Mary Driscoll

Mary Driscoll is founder of the nonprofit On With Living and Learning, Inc. OWLL’s advocacy performances present the authentic expression of women whose voices have been silenced in our communities. Her work has been performed as part of the African American Play Festival, by Boston Theatre Works, at Provincetown Fine Arts Center, and, for FPTC, in the play festival, “Gods, Monsters, and the Other,” and in Hotel Cassiopeia. Mary has combined her experience an occupational therapist with her passion for theatre to design a program that advances 21st century occupational and literacy skills. OWLL’s successful program is for people who are transitioning from marginalization to productive participation in their communities. As an actor. she has appeared on Boston, New York, and Provincetown stages. onwithlivingandlearning.org

Christie Lee Gibson

Christie Lee Gibson is an opera singer, actress, and creator/producer/director/coach of musical-theatrical happenings. She is drawn to the continuum of work spanning from experimental theatre to classical opera and pieces that exist at indefinable points along that spectrum. She has acted, directed, and been vocal coach for numerous FPTC productions, including Codes of Conduct, Carny Knowledge, Memories and Fantasies, and The Time of Your Life. She performed in France as Orphée in Offenbach’s Orphee Aux Enfers and in concerts of music by Saint-Saëns, Gounod, Poulenc, and Aboulker. Recent credits include The Four-Note Opera, The Choose-Your-Own-Opera, Der Zwerg, and L'Incoronazione di Poppea (OperaHub), Enjoy (Apollinaire), From Places Unknown (11:11 Theatre), Iolanthe (Mass Theatrica), Rusalka (Diva Day Foundation), and A Dream Play (Exquisite Corps). Currently she and composer Erin Huelskamp are developing a one-act chamber opera/movement-based theatre piece entitled The Ten-Block Walk: An Old-Person's Odyssey. She is a graduate of Brown University. christieleegibson.com

Silvia Graziano

Silvia Graziano, a playwright and poet, is FPTC's co-artistic director and resident playwright. FPTC premiered her full-length play Indiscreet Discretion in 2012. Silvia was co-impresario of FPTC’s Carny Knowledge, and FPTC’s first play festival featured her play The Romantic. In 2010, she was named a New Revolutionary in Boston Magazine for her work with Fort Point Theatre Channel. Her one-act play Trapped Inside a Low-fat Twinkie was featured in 2010 in FPTC’s Codes of Conduct. In 2011, she collaborated with Blue Spruce Theatre and composer David Reiffel to win Company One’s Fringe Wars for their musical Potter’s Field Bed and Breakfast. The team’s musical The Royal Institute for the Support and Healing of the Arts qualified them for the finals. Her short play Heads or Tales? was part of FeverFest 2010. Reflecting her interest in psychology, much of Silvia’s writing explores the best and the darkest sides of the human condition in a celebration of the quest for understanding ourselves. She coordinates a Harvard-affiliated Psychiatry Residency Training Program. Previously, she was an outreach worker, with a focus on the transgendered and chronically ill communities. Silvia has a BFA in dramatic writing from NYU.

Anne Loyer

Photo coming.

Anne Loyer is an emerging director, whose first film short won the "Indie Soul" Special Recognition award at the Boston International Film Festival. She has been involved in visual storytelling throughout her career: from her two-dimensional fine art work, to narrative animations, to public art projects and performances that included her audio and video collages based on participants’ stories. She recently served as art director for the Academic Media Studio at Wesleyan University, where she produced award-winning video and interactive web sites for educational use in the classroom and museum setting. While a guest artist at Montserrat College of Art, she collaborated with professor Gabrielle Keller and students on a project that evolved into the Odysseus Project, an ongoing dialogue among veterans, artists, and artist-veterans, with support from the Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at UMass Boston. The project’s current direction is "Tamziq, Scattered and Connected," an international and local collaboration between artists and students from the United States and the Middle East, with a focus on Iraq. Her work has been supported by grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Jane’s Trust, and a fellowship at the National Academy of Design. http://www.nervegarden.com/

Marc S. Miller

Marc S. Miller is FPTC’s co-artistic director, cofounder, and producer. He has directed for a number of Boston-area theatres and was a member of the Actors’ Coop of North Carolina. He directed FPTC’s productions of 4:48 Psychosis, The Time of Your Life, and Hotel Cassiopeia and Silvia Graziano’s Heads or Tales? for FeverFest 2010. Other favorite directing gigs include Arcadia, Pygmalion, Cloud Nine with the Longwood Players; Tone Clusters, Middle-Aged White Guys, and Arms and the Man with the Theatre Cooperative; Criminal Hearts with Theatre Unanimous (also co-producer); Play With a Tiger (independent production; also producer); and We Can’t Pay, We Won’t Pay with the Actors Coop of North Carolina. He has acted, stage managed, and swept the floors for countless theatre companies over four decades. A writer and editor for his day job, he has written or been project director for a dozen books, including several that won major awards. He has written on theatre, economic opportunity, health care, human rights, history, and technology policy. He is a long-time board member and past president of Resist Foundation, www.resistinc.org, and a board member of Fort Point Arts Community, www.forpointarts.org.

Sally Nutt

Sally Nutt first worked with FPTC in 2010 in Carny Knowledge, playing the frustrated wife and a needy mother in the short plays Wife of Bobbo and Love Me/Leave Me. Other recent area credits include The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (Miss Knag, Mrs. Wititerly, ensemble), Quills and Barefoot in the Park (Bad Habit Productions), Something About Swans (Blackburn Center for the Arts at Boston Playwrights Theatre), and Funny Money (Newburyport's Firehouse Center). She relishes working with playwrights, workshopping and performing in their new works, and as such, is an actor-in-residence with Boston’s Playwrights’ Platform. Sally grew up in rural New Jersey, traveled the world courtesy of the U.S. Air Force, currently resides on the North Shore . . . and has thrived on theatre in all those places. She is a voice-over artist and a member of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

Hana Pegrimkova

photo and bio coming

Amanda Sheehan

Amanda Sheehan is a freelance stage manager living in Boston who spends her summers company managing at the New London Barn Playhouse in New Hampshire. She has also dabbled in props design and is currently learning about marketing and pr for small theatres. She will be graduating from Dartmouth College with a Master's in Liberal Studies, creative writing focus, in June 2013.

Robin JaVonne Smith

Robin JaVonne Smith made her FPTC debut as the Newsboy in The Time of Your Life and recently played Flo in Sunday With Joy. Other credits include The Veiled Lady/Michelle Obama in Phantom of the Oprah (Ryan Landry’s Gold Dust Orphans) and Blanche/Pembroke in King John (Actors’ Shakespeare Project). She is also a member of the Beau Jest Moving Theatre company and appeared in a Tennessee Williams world premiere of American Gothic at the 2010 Tennessee Williams Theater Festival in Provincetown. She received her A.B. in English and theatre from Bowdoin College and studied at the British American Drama Academy in London.

Nick Thorkelson

Nick Thorkelson regularly performs his multimedia pieces in FPTC’s Exclamation Point! series. He played A Society Gentleman in FPTC’s The Time of Your Life, the father in Trapped Inside a Low-fat Twinkie, and Mr. Benson in Trapped Inside a Low-fat Twinkie, and he led the Carny Band in Carny Knowledge, for which he wrote the short play Lionel Banished. Previously, he co-wrote, with Josef Treggor, and helped stage a workshop production of Defarge, a musical based on A Tale of Two Cities. He has performed in various rock, blues, soul, and reggae bands, including Boston’s first reggae band, Jamaica Hylton. www.nickthorkelson.com

Douglas Urbank

Douglas Urbank is an experimental filmmaker with a background in sculpture and drawing who began working with film in 2008. His films are made primarily with 16 mm film stock using “direct film” techniques, including combinations of original and found footage, blank leader, hand coloring, adhesive overlays, and other interventions, and are edited on a light table without use of a traditional editing system. His work has been screened nationally at film festivals and tours and locally at experimental music programs with live sound accompaniment. Since 2001 he has hosted a radio program devoted to experimental, improvisational, and other unconventional music and sound art, and part of WZBC’s long-running “No Commercial Potential” weeknight programming from Boston College. The show aired previously for several years on Tufts University’s WMFO. www.douglasurbank.com

Daniel J. van Ackere

Daniel J. van Ackere graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in 1988 and has been photographing for a wide range of commercial and art-based clients ever since. He has collaborated on several photographic and holographic portrait projects with the late Harriet Casdin-Silver, an internationally renowned and long-time Fort Point artist, and is staff photographer at America’s Test Kitchen. Daniel is currently collaborating on a permanent public art piece based on his “Starry Night” installation, originally conceived for Fort Point Arts Community’s Winter Solstice Public Art Series. His continuing fascination with the illusory worlds of theatre and holography has melded with his current work in public art and his photographic pursuits of landscape, theatre, and dance. He can be reached on his website at www.danieljvanackere.com.