Eiko Otake

Eiko Otake has been teaching courses at Colorado College bi-annually since 2010. In 2021, Colorado College awarded Eiko an honorary degree for outstanding contributions in the field of dance. She is a Japanese choreographer/dancer who has lived in New York since 1976. Since 1972, when she abandoned her studies as a political science major, she and her partner Koma have collaborated as the performance team Eiko & Koma, creating and presenting a unique theater of movement in theaters, museums, festivals, and outdoor sites worldwide. Eiko & Koma have received many honors, including a 1996 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2004 American Dance Festival Scripps Award, and a 2006 Dance Magazine Award. Most recently, as an artist-in-residence at Wesleyan University in 2020, Eiko taught an interdisciplinary course combining the study of movement, postwar Japanese arts, and the atomic bombings. Eiko develops college courses that use movement study as means of inquiry along with readings and media studies and teaches regularly at Wesleyan University, New York University, in addition to Colorado College. Linked here is a video that a CC student Kate Montgomery created about Eiko's class, "Naked and Delicious: The State of Being" in 2011. Read more about Eiko at her website: https://www.eikootake.org/.

Kate Aronson

Kate Aronson has been a theater professional for over 25 years as an actor, director, producer, writer, and theater teacher. She taught acting, voice & speech, improvisation, and theater history for many years in the professional actors' training program at Point Park University. She has directed numerous plays in all theater genres, from Greek comedy to Shakespeare to contemporary musicals. She has worked and studied with Robert Wilson, Cicely Berry, Meredith Monk, and Peter Brosius, among others, and has performed all over the U.S., in London and Bulgaria. She has written, designed & produced several solo theater pieces; she co-founded, performed & toured with Squonk Opera, an experimental performance group as well as founding, producing & performing in the annual Women's Work Festival in Pittsburgh for several years. She is also a musician and is currently in a local band called Burn the Maps.     

Lauren Spencer

Lauren Spencer is a multi-hyphenate theater artist invested in creating art that invites us to grow into the right relationship with ourselves, each other, and the environment. She has performed with theaters across the country and is a member of the award-winning ensemble Campo Santo. As a director, she is passionate about bringing new stories to life, specializing in the development of new plays from first draft to production. She recently completed a residency with Berkeley Rep awarded for the development of her upcoming interdisciplinary piece, "The Cassandra Project." She is a founding member of The Coalition of Bay Area Black Women Theater Artists, a “Reimagining Political Power” Fellow with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and a recipient of California Shakespeare Festival's Luminary Award for her work applying theater arts in the classroom.

Suzanne Costello

Suzanne Costello has toured throughout the U.S. and abroad as a dance/theater director, choreographer, performer and teacher. She has been at the forefront of the arts and health field since introducing the Caring for the Caregiver program in 1991. Her focus on community-inclusive initiatives has engaged the often unseen in performance work including incarcerated populations, groups impacted by cancer, military and veterans, and caregivers. Costello has presented at conferences and universities globally and has been honored with multiple awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, Ohio Arts Council, Salt Lake City Arts Council, and others.  She is based in Minneapolis, MN.

Giovanni Ortega

Giovanni Ortega has been working professionally for over a decade as a playwright, performer, professor, and proponent of cultural navigation in the performing arts. He believes in creating an accepting and inclusive relationship with communities regardless of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and class. In the past few years, he's teamed up with several organizations around the world to observe how the arts and culture are used to inform different populations on how we can decimate discrimination and enhance acceptance.