Meet the Artistic Team
Catching On Thieves, Video Content Creator
Yolanda Wisher, Poet / Performer
David A. Gaines, Poet / Performer
Eugene Lew, Sound Designer
Nic Labadie-Bartz, Stage Manager
Itohan Edoloyi, Lighting Designer
Matthew Deinhart, Video Design
Ross Gay, Author
Tyshawn Sorey, Composer
Brooke O’Harra, Director
Yarn / Wire, Ensemble
Isaac Pollock,
Production Assistant
Heidi Ratanavanich,
Technical Director
Larry Scotton Jr.,
Epic Tech Sound Engineer
Timothy Belknap,
Carpenter
Justin Townsend,
Design Support and Care
Petra Floyd,
Creative Consultant
Girard College Students
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Danielle Ashley '23
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Derrick Bannister '25
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Somari Butler '25
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Jaelyn Handy '23
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Stephan Philemon '23
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Nylah Rankine '24
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Adeshina Tejan
Production Team
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Max Pendergast
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Carlos Diaz Stoop
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Paul M. Eaton
Music Director, Girard College
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Sylvia Bastani
Founding Producer, Girard College
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Adrienne Hessert
Production Coordinator, Girard College
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Adam McGrath
Marketing Director, Girard College
Ross Gay
Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His first collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller. His new collection of essays, Inciting Joy, was released by Algonquin in October of 2022.
Tyshawn Sorey
Newark-born composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey is a composer and musician who occupies a unique space in and between spontaneous and formal composition. An artist whose work has proven impossible to categorize, he has maintained a lifelong interest in establishing an alternative musical model that celebrates genre mobility both as an artistic ideal and a compositional attitude.
Sorey is currently Presidential Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania and composer-in-residence at Opera Philadelphia. He was also recently the Blodgett Artist in Residence at Harvard University. He was named a 2017 MacArthur fellow and a 2018 United States Artists Fellow. Among other awards and honors he has received include composition grants from the Shifting Foundation, Fromm Foundation, Van Lier Fellowship, and the Jerome Foundation, as well as the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s Impact Award and a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Brooke O’Harra
Brooke O'Harra is a professional theater director and an artist. She was co-founder of the NYC-based company The Theater of a Two-headed Calf and has developed and directed all 14 of Two headed Calf’s productions including the OBIE Award-winning Drum of the Waves of Horikawa (2007 HERE Arts Center), It Cannot Be Called Our Mother but Our Graves a.k.a Macbeth (Soho Rep Lab 2008/9), Trifles (Ontological Hysteric Incubator 2010), and the opera project You, My Mother (2012 at La Mama ETC, 2013 in the River to River Festival). She is also a co-founder with Sharon Hayes of The Performance Intensive.
She is a recipient of the Doris Duke Impact Award for Theatre and her work has been supported by numerous awards, grants and residencies including a Velocity grant from the Warhol Foundation, a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, several NYSCA grants, a Franklin Furnace performing artists award, an Arts Matters grant, the NEA/TCG Directors program, an OBIE award grant, a residency at The Performing Garage, and several LMCC and Chashama space grants. She is on faculty in the Creative Writing program at the University of Pennsylvania.
Yarn/Wire
Founded in 2005, Yarn/Wire is a New York-based percussion and piano quartet (Sae Hashimoto and Russell Greenberg, percussion; Laura Barger and Julia Den Boer, pianos) dedicated to promoting creative, experimental new music and expanding representation of composers to better reflect our communities and their creative potential.
Yarn/Wire has performed at the Lincoln Center, Edinburgh International, Rainy Days (Luxembourg), Ultima (Norway), Festival 20/21 (Belgium), Contemplus (Prague), and Wien Modern (Austria) Festivals, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra Hall, Dublin SoundLab, Monday Evening Concerts (LA), Brooklyn Academy of Music, and New York’s Miller Theatre. Commissions include works from composers Annea Lockwood, Enno Poppe, Michael Gordon, George Lewis, Ann Cleare, Catherine Lamb, Tyshawn Sorey, Kate Soper and more.
The ensemble runs the Yarn/Wire International Institute and Festival plus other educational residencies and outreach programs. Their ongoing commissioning series, Yarn / Wire / Currents, is an incubator for new experimental music.
Yolanda Wisher
Poet, singer, educator, and curator Yolanda Wisher is author of Monk Eats an Afro and co-editor of the anthology Peace is a Haiku Song with mentor Sonia Sanchez. Wisher was named inaugural Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania in 1999 and third Poet Laureate of Philadelphia for 2016 and 2017. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Poem-a-Day and has been commissioned by the Institute for Contemporary Art, HealthSpark, the Statue of Peace Plaza Committee, CBC Radio, and Philadelphia Jazz Project. A Pew and Cave Canem Fellow, Wisher received the Leeway Foundation's Transformation Award in 2019 for her commitment to art for social change.
Wisher teaches poetry workshops for all ages in a variety of settings. She taught high school English for a decade, co-founded the youth-led Germantown Poetry Festival, and served as Director of Art Education for Philadelphia Mural Arts. She is the founder of the School of Guerrilla Poetics, a training ground for folks interested in nurturing and mobilizing communities through poetry. As Curator of Spoken Word and Co-Director of Curatorial Programs at Philadelphia Contemporary, Wisher has produced programs like Stellar Masses, a series of poetry church services, and Love Jawns: A Mixtape, a collection of spoken word-infused soundscapes. She performs a blend of poetry and song with her band Yolanda Wisher & The Afroeaters. Doublehanded Suite, their debut album, was released in 2022.
David A. Gaines
David A. Gaines, also known as Dave G, is a Black writer, filmmaker and actor born and raised in the greater Philadelphia area. He is an award-winning and nationally touring poet, a fellow of The Watering Hole and holds multiple slam poetry championship titles, including 2017 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational Champion and ranking 4th in the 2018 Individual World Poetry Slam. His work has been featured in the National Black Arts Festival, International Human Rights Art Festival, Button Poetry, Write About Now, VICE Media, among many others.
In 2020, David was elected as Poet Laureate of Pennsylvania's Montgomery County and his directorial debut poetry short film, “fine china.”, was an official selection of the 2020 Motion Pictures International Film Festival, 9th International Video Poetry Festival, 2020 Midwest Video Poetry Fest, and 2020 arts x sdgs festival, and won several international awards, including 1st place at the 2020 Monologues & Poetry International Film Fest and the 5th Weimar Poetry Film Award.
Catching on Thieves
Catching On Thieves is a multimedia artist who creates to both understand what is to be & to stay alive. She writes of spies & prophets, Y2K conspiracies & the relationship between abstraction, perception & interception, using her body as a question mark meant to disturb our assumptions about what we say we know about what we are. Titles of her recent works include, Piano Lessons, “Memory, Vein,” A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Terrorist, Mulata She-male Gets it From All Sides, & Not One & Simple, or, What Would James Baldwin Do?
She was resident at the Queer Materials Lab, Translab, The Performance Intensive, PAPA, PAAFF, Session 9 of the Raw Materials Academie hosted at the ICA. She is currently getting her MFA at UPenn and is a Queer Art fellow being mentored by The Matrix co-director, Lilly Wachowski. Catching is also hoping you will take a nap today and stay hydrated.
Matthew Deinhart
Matthew Deinhart is a New York-based multidisciplinary designer. Recent design credits include the scenic design for Song of Joy (Premiere - The Tank) and Sweat (Brooklyn College), the lighting design for Dark Star of Harlem (La MaMa), Blackbird (New Ohio Theatre), and Tongue Depressor (Premiere -The Public), and the projection design for El Amor Brujo (La MaMa), ANIMUS ANIMA//ANIMA ANIMUS (Premiere - The Public), and the co-design of I Know Exactly What You Mean with Jon DeGaetano (Premiere - Danspace Project). Matthew is a 2021 graduate of Brooklyn College with an MFA in design and technical theater.
Eugene Lew
Eugene Lew is an educator, maker, & organizer primarily engaged in the production, management, transformation, design, performance, (attempted) capture, storage, and playback of sound/music—preferably in collaboration with others, in real life. The fleeting moment, aggregate independent decision-making, and stochastic phenomena are especially fascinating and vital to his practice and general existence. He seeks experiences that cannot be captured (or sought) but might be witnessed / overheard if one just so happens to be in the right place at the right time to slide step into the constant cycle of remembering / forgetting / reconstructing. He has resided and worked in Philadelphia for over 25 years and is committed to the city and the communities of which he is fortunate to be a member of.
Itohan Edoloyi
Itohan Edoloyi is a Brooklyn born lighting designer whose work is deeply rooted in community and culture. Her work aims to continue storytelling in nontraditional ways, crafting meaningful experiences through the lens of light and immersion. Itohan is the lead curator for InLight Collective. She has collaborated with artists like Kaneza Schaal, Emily Johnson, Yarn/Wire, Edo Tastic and is the resident lighting designer for Kyle Marshall Choreography company in addition to the annual Open Call Series at The Shed. Her work as a curator and light artist has been published by Rosco Spectrum and presented at JACK Arts and LaMaMa Galleria. Itohan received the 2021 Lilly Award and was the recipient of the 2018 Gilbert V. Hemsley Lighting Internship.
Nic Labadie-Bartz
Nic Labadie-Bartz is a freelance stage manager based in Philadelphia who loves to work in as many performance art forms as they can. Nic’s stage management work ranges from opera to cabaret, with plenty of devised, immersive, and/or dance theatre pieces in between. Recent collaborators include: Opera Philadelphia (The Raven), Bearded Ladies Cabaret (Love Notes: A Year of No Regrets, Blythely Ever After, Contradict This!, Do You Want a Cookie, You Can Never Go Down the Drain, Marlene and the Machine), John Jarboe (Rose: You Are Who You Eat), Applied Mechanics (Other Orbits, FEED, The Bandits, This Is On Record, Chronotope: Rough Draft), Theatre Exile (Today Is My Birthday, The Motherf*cker with the Hat, Extreme Home Makeover), Nichole Canuso Dance Company (Being/With, Pandaemonium), Headlong (A Perfect Day), New Paradise Laboratories (Gumshoe), MJ Kaufman (Destiny Estimate), Mary Tuomanen (Hello! Sadness!), Annie Wilson (At Home with the Humorless Bastard, Bilialien), Michael Kiley (Close Music for Bodies).
Hannah Chan
Hannah Chan is a student at the University of Pennsylvania and long-time theatre maker. Hannah has had experience in a range of roles, both onstage and backstage, including extensive experience in stage management, acting, as well as a producer and director. She previously conceived and directed a new devised production for Zoom, Home-Body, which premiered Fall 2020. She was previously Chair of iNtuitons Experimental Theatre Company and served on the board of Front Row Theatre Company.