Boston Conservatory Welcomes Innovators and Industry Leaders to Its Faculty

This fall, Boston Conservatory at Berklee welcomed several new faculty members who are bringing their professional expertise and artistry to the classroom. 

September 14, 2020

 

This fall, Boston Conservatory at Berklee welcomed several new faculty members who are bringing their professional expertise and artistry to the classroom. Collectively, the group brings to the table a wide range of skills and experiences, from leading major theater companies to making the performing arts more equitable, accessible, and diverse.

Jenna Pollack, Modern Dance Technique—is a collaborative choreographer, performer, educator, administrator, and organizer committed to facilitating ethical and equitable spaces. Pollack’s performance experience is diverse and extends beyond the concert stage. In addition to performing with major companies such as Bridge Repertory Theater, Scottish Dance Theatre, the Metropolitan Opera, American Repertory Theater, Bryan Arias, Equus Projects, and BOP Montréal, Pollack has collaborated with artists Ali Kenner Brodsky, Betsy Miller, and Heather Stewart. She was also the principal dancer in the 2019 feature film Little Women, directed by Greta Gerwig, was in a music video for Arcade Fire's Will Butler, featured in Pantone's Make it Brilliant ad campaign, was a highlighted Harvard Business School Online alumna, and was a guest on the Playbill podcast The Compass.

Emily Wright, Dance; Experiential Anatomy—is a dancer, movement educator, and author with a passion for the transformative power of dance. From 2008–2018, Wright was an associate professor of dance and the M.F.A. program director at Belhaven University, during which she oversaw the Modern Division, established a chapter of the National Honor Society for Dance Arts, and developed the M.F.A. degree program, which was the first terminal degree for dance in the state of Mississippi. Wright is an active and sought-after educator, teaching classes, presenting workshops, and holding residencies at community-based and university programs.

Michael Bobbitt, Musical Theater—is an arts leader, director, choreographer, educator, and playwright currently serving as artistic director of Boston’s renowned New Repertory Theater. Previously, Bobbitt served as artistic director for Adventure Theatre MTC in Maryland (2007–2019), where he led the organization to be a nationally respected theater/training company based in the Washington, D.C. area. He led a merger with Musical Theater Center, increased the organizational budget and audience, transitioned two shows to off-Broadway productions, built an academy, and earned eight Helen Hayes Awards. A focus of Bobbitt's work has been to connect with underserved populations and increase cultural diversity in theater. He pioneered sensory-friendly performances for children with autism spectrum disorders and other sensory sensitivities.

Charles Vincent Burwell, Musical Theater; Race, Identity, and Performance—is an educator, actor, singer, dancer, entrepreneur, musician, and musical theater composer who has long felt that diversity and creative identity were instrumental in the fashioning of a well-rounded artist. His work as a musical theater composer and lyricist includes Cubamor, a modern retelling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream featuring Afro-Cuban Orisha music/dance and hip-hop; Bottle Shock, a rock musical based on the 2008 cult film; Black Count, depicting novelist Alexandre Dumas’s Haitian ancestry; and the children’s musical Beautiful Game, which is about Brazilian soccer legend Edson Arantes do Nascimento, known as Pelé. In addition, he has worked with an array of internationally acclaimed artists and prestigious performing arts institutions, including the Lincoln Center Institute, National Dance Institute, Urban Bush Women, City Center, the Katherine Dunham Institute, Festival del Caribe (Cuba), Ile Aiye (Brazil), and the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.

José Delgado, Musical Theater—is an award-winning music director, vocal coach, arranger and accompanist who has collaborated and performed with several acclaimed artists such as Renée Elise Goldsberry, Jason Robert Brown, and Mary-Mitchell Campbell. Delgado currently serves as artistic director and conductor of Força Choir, the Boston-based multifaceted vocal ensemble that has performed live and recorded for numerous global video game titles, including Final Fantasy XV, Kingdom Hearts, Ace Combat 3D, and more. As a vocalist, he has had the privilege of singing under the batons of Maestros Seiji Ozawa, Keith Lockhart, John Oliver, John Williams, Rafael Frübeck de Burgos, and many more as a soloist and member of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus along with the Boston Symphony and Boston Pops orchestras in the U.S., as well as in Europe.

Tiffany Nichole Greene, Musical Theater—is a resident director for Hamilton: An American Musical, as well as an actor, teacher, and freelance director at theaters and educational programs nationwide. In addition to being an active stage director with an impressive portfolio of work, she was a casting director at the Dallas Theater Center from 2016 to 2018, and is a highly sought-after educator, having previously served on the faculties of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Xavier University, and the Collaborative Arts Project 21 (CAP21) in New York, and engaged as a visiting teaching artist in social activist theater at Baruch College Campus High School in New York. For many years, Greene also taught in the Young Actors Summer Institute at the Tony Award-winning Trinity Repertory Company.

Adam Souza, Musical Theater—is a performer, music director, and Boston Conservatory alumnus who was recently named artistic director of Goodspeed Musicals, the Connecticut theater company best known for championing new works and advancing the musical theater genre. Before becoming artistic director, Souza was an active collaborator with Goodspeed, first performing in the company’s orchestra for the shows George M! and Brigadoon, then serving as associate music director Great Expectations and The Road to Hollywood, which at the time were being workshopped at the Norma Terris. In addition to his expansive work with Goodspeed, Souza conducted the national tours of the Broadway hits Les Misérables, Spamalot, Wicked, Kinky Boots, and many more, collaborating with several prominent artists.

Ramone Owens, Musical Theater Ballet—is an actor, dancer, and Boston Conservatory alumnus best known for his work as an ensemble member of the hit Broadway musical Beetlejuice. A talented performer with a passion for dance, Owens has given several interviews on his professional journey, led workshops and master classes, and given fun tutorials on Beetlejuice’s unique choreography.

Lee Nishri-Howitt, Advanced Dialects—is a Boston-based voice, accent, and Shakespeare coach. Born in Israel, he earned a master’s degree in voice and speech at the A.R.T’s Institute for Advanced Theater Training and trained with notable directors Bill Rauch, Melia Bensussen, Adolf Shapiro, and Wojtek Klemm. Nishri-Howitt has taught and coached voice, accents, and Shakespeare in institutes such as the American Repertory Theater (LORT), the Moscow Art Theater School’s American Studio, the Ludwig Solski Academy of Dramatic Arts (Krakow, Poland), and Harvard University.

Pascale Florestal, Contemporary Theater Ensemble Performance Lab—is a director, dramaturg, educator, writer, and collaborator who has directed a plethora of works and has also assisted Billy Porter and Liesl Tommy. A proud Black artist, she is a fierce advocate of her Haitian Pride and home city of Miami, and is passionate about creating more opportunities for other queer artists of color. Florestal is the education director with the Front Porch Arts Collective, a new Black theater company committed to advancing racial equity through theater, and she has taught at Boston public schools and served as a youth advocate, organizing dynamic programs, workshops, and curriculum.

Jackie Davis, Acting—is an actor, director, and educator who has worked in theater, television and film. She is the founding artistic director of New Urban Theater Laboratory, where she produced and directed five years of new works, including Gift of an Orange, and she recently directed Race by David Mamet at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater. As a performer, she recently appeared in Trinity Repertory Company’s production of Marisol, and she portrays the role of abolitionist Susan Robbins in Columbia Pictures’ 2019 Little Women, directed by Greta Gerwig.

Learn more about Boston Conservatory’s undergraduate and graduate programs in dance, music, and theater and the world-class faculty that teach for them.