Our alumni have gone on to prestigious graduate programs as well as successful careers as actors, dancers, scholars, journalists, directors, producers, writers, designers, and more.
Read recent alumni notes below, or share your own note here.
1950s
Richard "Dick" Capp '58 earned an M.F.A. from UCLA Film School in 1976. He is now retired after making several short films and doing commercial flying for 52 years.
1960s
Robert Zagone '62 self-published ATTACK THE CAMERAS! Musings of an Independent Film and TV Director, an intimate look at his indie directing career. The stories reveal the nature of making films and videos during the turbulent 60s and 70s. Many moments, ambitious endeavors at the time, are now served with absurdity and amusement, but offer valuable lessons for aspiring indie filmmakers. Within the pages you meet influential artists: James Baldwin, Duke Ellington, Maya Angelou, Ralph J. Gleason, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, B.B. King, Danny Glover, Karen Black, and others. The book is available on Amazon.
1970s
Frieda Zolan (Fritzi Winnick) '70 is currently teaching her grandchildren Yang Style of Tai Chi and a few Kung Fu exercizes as well. She hopes to direct them and other kids in Charlotte's Web by E.B. White. Occasionally, she teaches drama in elementary schools while subbing. She is also an acrylic and collage artist.
Linda Warren (Gallatin) '71 had a meaningful career in employee and career development—teaching numerous classes in interpersonal communication, stress management, and team building in various companies. Going to UC was a major highlight of her life. It allowed her to become the creative person she was meant to be.
David Ginsberg (Ginnes) '71–73 practiced civil litigation for four years, then produced computer graphics/VFX until 2000, then served as general counsel of a software company until 2022. He is now retired and would love to hear from any of his old Dramatic Arts classmates.
Maxine Rose Schur '73 aspired to be a professional actress and did—on stage and TV in New Zealand from 1972 to 1975. Returning to California, she became a travel essayist and a children's book author. Her two latest books are the re-publication of her award-winning travel memoir, Places in Time, of which the SF Chronicle wrote, "This is what travel memoirs should be and so seldom are," and her middle grade fantasy novel, The Word Dancer, which Publishers Weekly called, "lyrical and propulsive, brimming with amusing and innovative ideas." Maxine now lives in San Rafael.
Stephanie Willman '76 danced professionally in several modern ballet dance companies for over 25 years. After sustaining a torn Achilles tendon, she embarked on a career teaching Pilates. She is presently teaching/training Pilates in New Jersey. She loves what she does, and would never have imagined a career having danced her whole life. She might add that having graduated from UC Berkeley was one the most important accomplishments in her lifetime!
Judith Brooks '77 is now a retired high school teacher as of August 2022. She is presently the Retired Members Chair for CAHPERD (California Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance). She is also actively involved with the UC Berkeley Black Alumni Association where she volunteers to help with special projects and activities. Judith is a member of the Sacred Dance Guild and participates in dance workshops and activities. She still has her love for dance and the arts.
Charles Ray '77 spent 25 years doing special effects and carpentry for Industrial Light and Magic in San Rafael. Over the course of his career he worked on over 50 films, television shows, and commercials. Charles recently moved from Oakland to Arnold, CA after the passing of his wife, Diane Colantonio '78. He frequently travels to visit other UC grads, high school friends, and relatives all over the country. His two grown children, Alec and Marissa, live in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Derek Duarte '78 retired from Santa Clara University where he was a senior lecturer and resident lighting designer for 27 years. Derek is relocating to Minneapolis and continuing to work as a free-lance lighting designer. Learn about his work at Derek-Duarte-Lighting.com
1980s
Roxann Dawson '80 has been blessed with several careers in the business. She started with A Chorus Line on Broadway as Diana Morales, then seven years as B’Elanna Torres on Star Trek: Voyager, where she began directing. She has been directing film and television for over 20 years now. The Horror of Dolores Roach drops on Amazon July 7, and season two of Apple TV's Foundation drops July 14. Roxann serves as director and executive producer on both. She thanks Berkeley for her roots.
Amy Lincoln '81 went in a completely different direction with her career—in corporate America. She has retired from that world and has taken up visual arts very diligently. Her artwork includes oil painting, gouache, watercolor, and digital arts. She participates in art shows, and works to express her creativity. "Many thanks to UC Berkeley for the discipline it instilled in me," Amy said. "I never give up on following my dreams."
Marilyn Stanley '81 is happy to be back at Zellerbach Hall working for Cal Performances (after many years as an arts administrator and theater artist at California Arts Council, Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, and Shotgun Players). She started in the Cal Performances education department, worked several years for summer AileyCamps, and is now in the finance department.
Phil Abrams '83 now has more than 160 film/television appearances and continues to happily pound the pavement in LA. Most recently he’s appeared in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The Goldbergs, How I Met Your Father, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Dave (a favorite!), and The Conners. He also had the pleasure of working with his wife, Michelle Bitting ’86, in a Chase Bank commercial! Michelle is currently a senior lecturer at Loyola Marymount University and a highly-regarded published poet. Phil also lends his talents to the acting community as The Audition Physician. Phil is incredibly grateful for the continued close friendships of many of his peers from Cal.
Gregory Scott Cummins '83 has been making a living professionally for 38 years (since 1985) in film, TV, and theater. He can currently be seen as Crate (Detective Moore) on Bosch and Bosch: Legacy, as well as Luther (Mac's dad) in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Greg received his M.F.A. in Acting from UCLA in 1985. He was the starting punter on Cal's football team in '74 and '75 before punting in his last two years for the University of Hawaii Rainbow Warriors.
Stan Lai, Ph.D. '83 inaugurated the Huichang Theatre Village in his father's hometown in rural China on January 24 and premiered a new play, Flower in the Mirror, Moon in the Water. His play River/Cloud will tour China this year, starting at the Wuzhen Theatre Festival. Many of his other plays are touring and can be seen at his base in Shanghai, Theatre Above including The Village and One One Zero Eight. A Dream Like A Dream will perform in Taipei starting December 24 and Shanghai starting January 25 (different productions and casts). The Summer 2021 issue of TDR featured the article, An Illusion that Mirrors a Dream: The Storytelling of Stan Lai. Stan's son-in-law, Pawo Choyning Dorji, wrote and directed The Monk and the Gun, which was shortlisted at the Oscars for Best International Feature.
1990s
Tiffany Lee Brown '91 works at the confluence of performance, voice, art, and writing. After UC Berkeley, she went on to earn an M.F.A. in Interdisciplinary Arts. Her current manifestations include narrating nature walks on the Burning Tarot podcast, writing and performing poetry, writing a memoir, delineating astrological charts for clients, parenting a creative child, and writing a small-town newspaper column, "In the Pines." She is also the consulting Editorial Director for the design and branding firm Plazm. Learn more at TiffanyLeeBrown.com
Kevin Koster '91 continues to work as a 1st Assistant Director in episodic television production, currently on the third season of P-Valley in Atlanta, and recently on the second season of Bookie in Los Angeles.
Stefanie Singer '91 was promoted to the position of Director of Clinical Services at Summit View West School in Culver City, CA.
Allen Kuharski, M.A. '86, Ph.D. '91 lives in Philadelphia and is Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scholar in the Department of Theater at Swarthmore College. He teaches part-time in the Pig Iron School's M.F.A. Program in Devised Performance. Allen also teaches Chinese students every summer in Beijing and Shanghai. With Pig Iron's Quinn Bauriedel, Allen co-directed an NEH Institute on Devised Ensemble Physical Theatre in Philadelphia 2023 (which they propose to repeat in 2025). His article on the Institute was published in Yale Theater. Allen returned to Poland in March, where he taught a four-day workshop for dance theater students in Katowice. Learn more about Allen's work at Swarthmore.edu
Michael Habicht '96 is still involved in drama through the real-life struggles of the Emergency Department where he is a physician in Lake Tahoe. He hasn't worked in theater professionally for over 20 years, but now that his kids are in high school he has been up in the rafters again helping design The Sound of Music and Servant of Two Masters with his younger son.
Dorian Traube '99 was a professor of social work at the University of Southern California and has been appointed as the next dean of the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.
2000s
Alfredo Garcia ‘04 is currently playing Sargent Lopez in Teatro Espejo’s The Language of Flowers. The production is a “Dia De Los Muertos Romeo and Juliet.” The teatro runs October 10–20, 2024 at the Black Box Theater in West Sacramento. The show celebrates Chicano Teatro and coincides with Teatro Espejo’s cincuentenaria!
Patrick Anderson, Ph.D. '05 is the current Chair of the Department of Communication at UC San Diego. He is also finishing his year as a Guggenheim Fellow. His next book, The Lamentations: A Requiem For Queer Suicide will be released by Fordham University Press in September 2024.
Marni Davis '05 is a middle school drama teacher in West Sonoma County.
Charles Slender-White '06 is the Artistic Director of FACT/SF, a San Francisco-based contemporary dance company he founded in 2008. He is also one of 44 Countertechnique teachers worldwide, and teaches workshops throughout North America and Europe, and on faculty at the American Dance Festival. Slender-White’s leadership in the dance field was recently recognized by Rachel Howard in her year-end article for the SF Chronicle and by Rachel Caldwell for Dance Magazine. In 2022, FACT/SF became the first dance company in the US to pay people to apply to its programs, and in 2023, the first to pay dancers to audition.
Santia Andrews '07 had an unforgettable experience performing at Carnaval over Memorial Weekend with the electrifying dance company Amor do Samba. She's thrilled to announce that they have invited her to join their dynamic company! But that's not all—this summer, Santia has four dances competing in the prestigious World Dance Championship. You can also spot her in an Apple commercial!
Deborist Benjamin Burke '07 is a marriage and family therapist. On September 19, she will lead a one-day seminar based on her book, When My Daddy Became My Mommy: Navigating with the Child Whose Parent is Transitioning. The seminar will be hosted by the Glorious Healing Heart Institute and presented internationally online. Continuing education units are available. For more information, call 805-402-4777.
2010s
Cai (Caitlin) Kagawa '10 is a working member of IATSE 705 (Motion Picture Costumers) at Western Costume Co. in the Uniform Division working with military and municipal insignia and research by day. By night, they are a tabletop gaming performer and creativor using their knowledge as a designer to help build worlds and characters for use in published games such as the recently released 2nd Edition of For the Queen from Darrington Press. As an award-winning performer, they specialize in stories of radical joy and the intersection of love and grief with TransplanarRPG as a core cast member of The Chaos Protocol
Kelly Rafferty, Ph.D. '10 won a Peabody Award for her work as a consulting producer on the Showtime docu-series We Need to Talk About Cosby She followed up that win with an Emmy Award and the Television Academy Honors for producing the HBO documentary, 1000% Me: Growing Up Mixed She serves as VP, Creative for W. Kamau Bell’s Oakland-based company Who Knows Best Productions.
Jessica Charles '10 is a Black, queer, woman-identifying playwright whose work holds and uplifts historically underrepresented voices. Her play Antiquated F*ckery(link is external) makes its Off-Broadway debut in October 2023 at 59E59 Theatre! Antiquated F*ckery explores the creative struggle of two Black, queer artists trying to make it in an industry that considers them at once too Black and not Black enough.
Ariel Osterweis, Ph.D. '11 has a new book, Body Impossible: Desmond Richardson and the Politics of Virtuosity published by Oxford University Press on February 2, 2024 as part of the Studies in Dance Theory series.
Brianna Mercado '13 was Associate Choreographer for The Public Theater Mobile Unit's production of The Comedy of Errors This bilingual musical version of Shakespeare's comedy brings free performances to all five boroughs of New York City.
Ariel Miranda Conkel '14 is currently in Norfolk, VA, daylighting as a Naval Flight Officer. Her next project is Rosie the Riveter: The Immersive Experience by Trey Clarkson, produced by ROŪGE: Theater Reinvented in collaboration with the Military Aviation Museum. Performances run Nov. 7–16, 2024.
Iván A. Ramos, Ph.D. '15 had his first scholarly monograph, Unbelonging: Dissonant Sounds in Mexican and Latinx Aesthetics published in July 2023 by NYU Press. Based on research started during his time in the Ph.D. in Performance Studies at Berkeley, the book examines how Mexican and Latinx contemporary artists used alternative sounds to reject the demands of neoliberal belonging. Iván received a 2023 Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders Award from the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation) for his work at Brown University.
Caitlin Marshall, Ph.D. '16 joins the University of Maryland as an assistant professor in Fall 2024. Her article, "Ear Training for History: Listening to Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield's Double-Voiced Aesthetics," received an honorable mention for the 2024 Vera Mowry Roberts Award from the American Drama and Theatre Society.
Heather Rastovac Akbarzadeh, Ph.D. '16 began a position as an assistant professor in Critical Dance Studies at UC Riverside in January 2024.
Takeo Rivera, Ph.D. '17 won the 2024 Honorable Mention for the Media, Performance, and Visual Studies Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies for his book Model Minority Masochism: Performing the Cultural Politics of Asian American Masculinity This marks the second consecutive year that a TDPS alum won Honorable Mention for this prize (the 2023 Honorable Mention having gone to Hentyle Yapp for Minor China). He was joined at the awards ceremony by fellow Ph.D. alumni Natalia Duong, Miyoko Conley, and Lashon Daley. Currently, Takeo is up for tenure in the English department at Boston University.
Joe Ayers '18 worked professionally in Bay Area theater for two years post-graduation. He was accepted into the prestigious FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training and graduated with his M.F.A. in 2023. For the last year, he’s been seen on stages around the Bay Area, playing Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing at New Canon Theatre Company, Jordan in Significant Other at Los Altos Stage Company, Casey in The Legend of Georgia McBride at Center REP, and David in Torch Song at Marin Theatre. He’s also an Adjunct Instructor of Theatre Arts at Chabot College. This fall, you can catch him on stage as Max in The Play That Goes Wrong at San Francisco Playhouse!
Hernán Angulo '19 is back in the Bay Area for the summer to perform in The Lifespan of a Fact at Aurora Theatre Company (June 20 – July 21). He will also teach audition technique for American Conservatory Theater’s Summer Training Congress.
Molly Olis Krost '16 was a finalist for the 46th Bay Area Playwrights Festival(link is external) for her play NANAY. The play also received a workshop as part of Town Hall Theater's New Voice Series in 2023.
Ely Sonny Orquiza '17 was named a 2023 YBCA 100 Honoree for his work around The Living Document and his contributions to various communities in the Bay Area through educational theatre. He is the Director of Education and Community at Magic Theatre where he has dedicated himself to empowering marginalized voices from longterm survivors of AIDS/HIV to formerly incarcerated people, South East Asian refugee and asylum seekers, and Black and Brown artists in San Francisco. In 2023, he developed and directed a new musical called SHIDAIQU set in Shanghai in the 1930s, which explores the political tension and the captivating music of the era.
Claire Pearson '19 began an acting career in the Bay Area working with companies like Berkeley Playhouse and Bay Area Musicals. She is now pursuing a dual Masters in Theater Management and Business Administration at Cal State Long Beach. Claire is currently a grant-writer for arts organizations around Southern California.
2020s
Salwa Meghjee '20 will be attending the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at Juilliard in Fall 2024. Learn about her work at SalwaMeghjee.com
Swetha Prabakaran '20 was featured in the October 2023 issue of Dance Magazine in an article on Majors and Minors That Enrich a Dance Degree. She is a technical product manager by day, and has continued to dance and choreograph since graduating.
Priya Roy '21 produced her first show, Lover's Inferno, an immersive live music and aerial concert exploring heartbreak and hell! She is continuing these Aerial Acoustics productions with her co-producer, who is a Cal alum too! She has a band called Velvet Affairs who play in NYC regularly, fusing genres and languages—all love songs! She is also in a queer Asian play, runs a support group for POC artists, started doing burlesque professionally, hosts wellness events with live music and meditation, and has her debut album coming out this year. She is learning how to manage freelance full-time artist life with chronic illness and learning how to not give up on herself or her dreams. Learn more at PriyaOnStage.com
Miyuki Baker, Ph.D. '22 launched a consulting practice in 2023 to support scholars to visually translate their theoretical offerings into what they call “Visual Theory Maps,” so that the liberatory ideas can reach a wider audience. During their Ph.D. Miyuki developed Visual Theory Maps and other “Beautiful Scholarship” methods, which led them to publishing The Black feminist Theory Atlas with Malika Imhotep, co-curating the OMCA Hella Feminist show, and leading a study session for the museum.
Caleb Luna, Ph.D. '22 accepted an Assistant Professor position with their postdoctoral department, Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. Read a recent article about how Caleb "centers fat experiences in poetry and cultural critique."
Bryce van der Klomp '23 returned to Los Angeles where he is working on writing (plays and fiction), auditioning, and starting a new photography business. He specializes in actor headshot photography and is currently open for bookings in the LA County area.