Biographies of guest speakers and panelists

Dan Brick

Producing Director and Co-Founder, Solas Nua

Dan Brick is a graduate of N.Y.U. Tisch School of the Arts, the Producing Director and co-founder of Solas Nua, the Artistic Director Emeritus of the avant-garde theatre company Purchased Experiences and the 2006 recipient of the Theatre Lobby's Marry Goldwater Trust Fund Award. Most recently Mr. Brick directed Enda Walsh's Bedbound for Solas Nua. Selected previous credits include Howie the Rookie, Disco Pigs, Misterman (Solas Nua); The Lonesome West, Belgrade Trilogy, Rum and Vodka, Shopping and Fucking (SCENA); 7 Blowjobs, Harm's Way, Sexual Perversity in Chicago (Purchased Experiences); Power of the Dog, The Dumb-Waiter (Longacre Lea); Henry V, Macbeth (WSC); Tape (Yellow Taxi); Killer Joe (Cherry Red); A Clockwork Orange (Studio Secondstage); The Last Time I Wore a Dress (Source); and shows for Imagination Stage, Classika, Volta Theatre, Washington Theatre Festival, and Playwrights Horizons.

Thomas Cousineau

Professor of English, Washington College

Thomas Cousineau is Professor of English at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. A graduate of Boston College, he received his doctorate from the University of California at Davis, where he wrote a dissertation on Beckett's novels. The author of Waiting for Godot: Form in Movement, After the Final No: Samuel Beckett's Trilogy, and Ritual Unbound: Reading Sacrifice in Modernist Fiction, he has also edited "Beckett in France," a special issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies, and currently serves as editor of the newsletter of the Samuel Beckett Society.

Michael Dove

Artistic Director, Forum Theater

Michael Dove is the Artistic Director of Forum Theatre & Dance. Michael has staged Forum's Beckett: The Shorter Plays (including Not I, Come and Go, Krapp's Last Tape, Catastrophe, Rockaby, Footfalls, and Breath), Hamletmachine, The Memorandum, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and will direct next season's production of Valparaiso. Other directing credits include La Corbiere (co-Directed with Linda Murray, Solas Nua), Cabaret, Edward Albee's Fragments, and Power Lunch. Michael also participates in the Woolly Mammoth / Playground reading series. As an actor, Michael has appeared in productions with Washington Shakespeare (Hapgood), Shenandoah Shakespeare, the Stratford Players, The Lost Colony, JMU Children's Playshop, Barnstormers, JMU Masterpiece Season, and DC's The Big Honkin'. As a writer, he has co-written, with Justin Tolley, The Fatal Marksman and sketch comedy with The Big Honkin'. Mr. Dove is also a scenic, lighting, and costume designer.

Gerry Dukes

Freelance editor, critic and writer

Gerry Dukes was a lecturer in literature and Research Fellow at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick until the end of August this year. He is now a freelance editor, critic and writer. He is a specialist in the work of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Having published his annotated edition of Beckett's postwar novellas, First Love and Other Novellas, Penguin have also published his Illustrated Lives: Samuel Beckett, a pictorial biography of the writer. With the actor Barry McGovern he adapted Beckett's postwar trilogy of novels as a one-man Beckett show, I'll Go On, which premiered at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1985 and which has become a benchmark for Beckett productions worldwide. He is a regular contributor to journals, magazines and newspapers and has frequently written for television and radio. He is currently writing a study of Synge, Joyce and Beckett and modernist Irish writing.

Jay Hardee

Actor, Washington Shakespeare Company

Jay Hardee has acted with Washington Shakespeare Company, SCENA Theatre, Forum Theatre & Dance, Actors Theatre of Washington, and Journeymen Theatre Ensemble. This season he will play Alan in Equus directed by Lee Mikeska Gardner at WSC; various roles in Writer's Cramp directed by Kathleen Akerley at SCENA; and one of Jose Carrasquillo's Witches in Macbeth at WSC.

Christopher Henley

Artistic Director, Washington Shakespeare Company

Christopher Henley is a founding ensemble member and current artistic director of Washington Shakespeare Company; recent WSC appearances include Martha in The Children's Hour and the title role in Richard II. He is also a founding company member at SCENA Theatre; recent SCENA appearances include the one-person Wallace Shawn play The Fever and Joseph K in The Trial. Favorite Beckett roles include Vladimir in WSC's Waiting for Godot and Clov in Endgame, and Protagonist in Catastrophe for SCENA.

Angela Moorjani

Emerita Professor of French and intercultural pragmatics, University of Maryland Baltimore County

Angela Moorjani is Emerita Professor of French and intercultural pragmatics at the UMBC campus of the University of Maryland in Baltimore. Her leading poststructural study Abysmal Games in the Novels of Samuel Beckett focuses on repetition and the forms of play with being and non-being that Beckett embeds in his fiction. Her other books and essays draw on pragmatic, psychoanalytic, and feminist thought to probe the social implications of melancholy and fetishism in modernist art and literature. Among her books are The Aesthetics of Loss and Lessness (with a chapter on Paul Klee), Beyond Fetishism and Other Excursions in Pyschopragmatics, and two co-edited volumes on Beckett. She is a member of the executive board of the Samuel Beckett Society. She began her career of celebrating Beckett in College Park the year she graduated at the head of the class of '63.

Linda Murray

Artistic Director, Solas Nua

Dublin native, Linda Murray, is the Artistic Director of Solas Nua and recently directed La Corbiere, The Mai, Howie the Rookie, and Misterman for the company. She holds a BA in languages from Trinity College, Dublin, an MA in Theatre from UCC, and is currently working on a PhD in Dance through the University of Surrey. She trained as a ballet dancer with the RAD and studied modern dance with Dance Theatre Ireland. She has performed throughout Europe as well as appearing on stage here in DC, most recently in Solas Nua's productions of Disco Pigs, Bedbound, and La Corbiere. Also a musician, she studied piano for ten years at the College of Music, Dublin. In addition to this, Linda has worked in Europe as an arts critic for several years and has contributed to Irish Theatre Magazine, Ballettanz International, and Altamusica, among others.

Lois Oppenheim

Chair, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Montclair State University

Lois Oppenheim is Distinguished Scholar, Professor of French, and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Montclair State University. She has authored or edited ten books and published over sixty articles. Her most recent books include A Curious Intimacy: Art and Neuro-Psychoanalysis (which was published in 2005 by Routledge) and The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett's Dialogue With Art (published by the University of Michigan Press in 2000). Dr. Oppenheim is a past president of the international Samuel Beckett Society and a member of the advisory board of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination in New York. She lectures widely in the US and abroad and has served as a consultant to or organizer of several symposiums on Beckett. Dr. Oppenheim's current research focuses on neurobiology and creativity and she is now undertaking a new project on the role of mirror neurons in both the creation and viewing of the visual arts.

Brian Richardson

Professor of English, University of Maryland

Brian Richardson in Professor in the English Department at the Unversity of Maryland. He is the author of two books, Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative and Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, which discusses a large number of Beckettian texts. He is the editor of Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames and Narrative Beginnings (forthcoming). He has published several articles on Beckett's fiction and drama.