Artist In residence
Spinning Dot Theatre is excited to collaborate with local, national and international artists in the development of new work for young audiences.
Pictured: Scene from Connected by Ori Urian
2024
Shavonne Coleman
Shavonne Coleman (she/they) is an Assistant Professor of Applied Theatre in the Theatre and Drama Department at the University of Michigan. Originally from Detroit, MI, she is a fabulist, facilitator, teaching artist, actor, director, playwright, and community cultivator. Coleman also serves on the boards of both the Children’s Theatre Foundation of America (CTFA) and TYA/USA (Theatre for Young Audiences).
She earned her BA in Theatre (2007) from Grand Valley State University and her MFA in Applied Drama/Theatre for the Young (2017) from Eastern Michigan University. Alongside traditional theatre productions, Shavonne brings her love for acting to short films, poetry, and spinning fables. She is deeply committed to applied theatre, using her craft for organizing and social change through devising, performance, and storytelling. Notably, she served as Director of Theatre for Dialogue, an interactive theatre ensemble for interpersonal violence prevention at the University of Texas.
Currently, Shavonne is contributing a chapter to the forthcoming TYA play anthology Every Great Dream, edited by Jose Casas and Tiffany Trent. She is also collaborating with Seattle Children’s Theatre on a community-engaged adaptation of the book Your Name is a Song by Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow. Additionally, Coleman has been commissioned by Spinning Dot Theatre and Eastern Michigan University to write Cause Play for the TYA BIPOC Superheroes Project, set to premiere at EMU in April 2025. She is also joining Gus Weltsek and Jose Casas in writing and editing for the upcoming TYA BIPOC Superheroes Project Anthology.
In 2023, Shavonne won the AATE Ann K. Flagg Multicultural Award. As an actor, she recently played the role of Lulu in Between Riverside and Crazy at the Detroit Repertory Theatre. She is now taking on the role of Guest Director in Residence at Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit for the 2024-2025 season.
PAST RESIDENTS
2023
Ori Urian
Ori is a playwright, screenwriter, and actor based in Tel Aviv, Israel. He wrote his first play at the age of 19. He studied acting at the acclaimed Nissan Nativ Acting School in Tel Aviv (2009), and playwriting at Levinsky College of Education (2011).
His work has been produced by Habima National Theater, Cameri Theater of Tel Aviv, Orna Porat Theater, Mediatheque Theater, and Hashaa Theater. As a performer, Ori has performed in several theaters as well as in many television shows and films. He won the Best Supporting Actor Award, Best Leading Actor Award, and Best New Play Award in the Israeli Children’s Stage Awards.
In addition to his acting and writing career, Ori is currently a member of the Fringe Committee of the Israeli Ministry of Culture, and a lector at Habima National Theater and Cameri Theater – two of the largest and most important theaters in Israel.
2022
Cameron Prevatte
Cameron Prevatte is a teaching artist, performer, and puppeteer from Greensboro, North Carolina. His speciality is working with cardboard, tape, mache, and other found objects to make puppets and masks come to life. Physical theatre, clowning, and object manipulation are the core of his training, as he continues to investigate how to spark imagination in his audiences. As an educator, Cameron uses hands-on lessons, facilitating collaborative spaces for the child artist to create. He recently created a multi sided mask for a short piece for elementary school students entitled Mind!,using multiple facial expressions to communicate non-verbally to the child audience. His workshops use newspaper, tape, and other found objects to create masks and puppets for performance use. Cameron has worked with North Carolina based group Paperhand Puppet Intervention for a decade, animating giant masks, pageant puppets, and other multi person puppets.
He has been a teaching artist for multiple organizations, including summer circus artist at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, lead visual art and dramatics teacher at The Piedmont School, and touring school performer with the North Carolina Theatre for Young People. He has taught with Spinning Dot Theatre for the past year as director and deviser of new work with their Youth company. He currently resides in Detroit, getting his MFA in Applied Drama and Theatre for the Young from Eastern Michigan University. Cameron has a BFA in Acting from the University of North Carolina Greensboro.
2020
Monica Kozakiewicz
Monica’s passion for theatre has held strong from her early years in community theatre in her hometown of Midland, MI to competing with Eastern Michigan University’s Forensics team to go on to earn her MFA in Applied Drama/Theatre for Young Audiences( Eastern Michigan University). With a heart for working with young children, Monica’s day job is teaching Montessori preschool. She is certified through the American Montessori Society and has been teaching in a Montessori environment for several years now. Having visited many different areas of our country, toured Scotland while visiting family, and studied abroad in South Africa, she has found a thirst for travel and experiencing as much of humanity as possible. Spinning Dot’s mission of making the world bigger and smaller at the same time . . . one play at a time . . . really speaks to her. She is beyond grateful to have this opportunity to create, play, and dream. It is her wish during this residency to add beauty to this world in such strange and challenging times and provide hope as the arts have always given that to her.
2019
Chelsea Wooley
2018
José Casas
José Casas is a playwright, director, and actor. He is an Assistant Professor and head of the Playwriting Program in the Department of Theatre and Drama. He is a Board Member of The Children’s Theatre Foundation and Spinning Dot Theatre. He is a member of The American Alliance of Theatre and Education, TYA/USA, and he Dramatists Guild. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre Arts from the University of California, Santa Barbara, a Master of Arts in Theatre Arts from California State University, Los Angeles and a Master of Fine Arts in Playwriting from Arizona State. His plays have been produced across the country and include la rosa grows beyond the wall, all brown all chingon, aDoBe, a million whispers all at once, the vine, and Flint. His plays, la ofrenda and somebody’s children received both the Bonderman National Playwriting for Youth Award (2005, 2009) and the AATE Distinguished Play Award (2007, 2010). His work has been included in a number of anthologies such as The Bully Plays, Ethnodrama: An Anthology of Reality Theatre, and Theatre for Youth II: More Plays With Mature Themes.
His published work includes la ofrenda, 14, somebody’s children, and Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences which was awarded the 2019 AATE Distinguished Book Award.
2017
Lereko Mfono
Lereko Mfono is a multi-faceted writer, actor and drama facilitator who honed his craft at the National School of the Arts and later studied Applied drama at Wits University in Johannesburg.
Lereko has participated in various national and international writing projects, such as the ASSITEJ Inspiring a Generation programme that led him to travel to France, Paris in 2013 to develop self-penned Standard Bank Ovation award-winning play Narrative Dreams. He also travelled to the US, Washington DC, in 2016 after being selected to take part in The Kennedy Centre’s New Visions/New Voices Festival where his play, The Kids From Amandla Street, enjoyed its development and a staged reading.
Lereko was among three playwrights to win the Imbewu-Scribe national playwright’s competition with his play Malebone in 2013.
Lereko has facilitated and taught Creative Arts in Correctional Centers, High Schools in and around South Africa and took part in the Department Of Arts and Culture’s Artist-In-Schools programme in 2015. He runs a company with his wife Limpho called Seeds of Water (SOW) that produces work for young audiences and takes theatre into schools.
2016
Big Fire
Tae Hoon Yoo (aka Big Fire) is originally from Seoul, South Korea, and has a degree in Acting (B.F.A.) from Korean National University of Arts. While in Korea, he trained to be a mime, but after taking many voice lessons from Ralph Wells (baritone, LA Opera), he learned how to let his voice be heard in theatre. Influenced by Mary Overlie (Viewpoints) and Anna Deavere Smith (personal narrative) while he studied Performance Studies (M.A.) at NYU Tisch, he became even more interested in how to engage audiences through opera, cabaret, and narrative performance.
2015
Kelly Fielder
Kelly Fielder is a scholar and practitioner with an M.F.A. in Theatre for Youth and Communities from Arizona State University. She has performed theatre residencies across the United States and internationally in Pakistan, Norway, and Canada. Kelly is honored to be a founding member of Spinning Dot Theatre and the inaugural Artist-in-Residence with her work on “Sedna, The Goddess of the Sea,” in which she utilized her skills in puppetry, storytelling, and creating intimate and transformative spaces.