PTO Board of Directors
Board Officers
Toby Emert (President)
Toby Emert is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education and Director of Teacher Education at Agnes Scott College near Atlanta, Georgia. He also teaches in the Creative Arts in Learning Graduate Program for Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts--a gig that has him traveling around the country working with teachers to incorporate the creative arts into their curricula and classrooms.
Alexander Santiago-Jirau (President-Elect)
Alexander Santiago-Jirau is a theatre artist and educator who uses theatre for youth and community development. He is an M.A. Candidate in Educational Theatre at New York University. Alex has been a Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner since 2000, working with LGBTQ youth, youth in foster care, and immigrant youth. He is Senior Program Associate at The Center for Arts Education in New York City, where he counsels youth interested in pursuing arts careers.
Doug Paterson (Past President)
Ellie Friedland (Secretary)
Ellie Friedland is an Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education at Wheelock College in Boston. She works with the Wheelock Family Theatre, where she works with Theatre of the Oppressed with teens. She has been an activist educator, writer and performer for more than 25 years. She specializes in drama, movement, clowning, and creative writing for children and educators.
Charles Adams (Treasurer)
Charles Adams is ABD in the Theatre Historiography program at the University of Minnesota. His research is in areas of theatre and social change, especially in the fields of Theatre in Education, critical pedagogies, and transformation. He has worked as a teaching artist for 15 years, training novice teaching artists as well as teaching educators in methodologies and philosophies for using embodiment as a means of resisting dehumanizing modes of education.
Board Members
Elizabeth Ahlstrom
Elizabeth Ahlstrom graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and received a Bachelor's Degree in Theatre in Society. She lives in Milwaukee where she is a film projectionist, freelance actor/director, and teaching artist. She is currently producing endeavors with Quasi~Productions utilizing applied theatre techniques to foster community dialogue and social change working with educational museums, counseling centers, and after-school programs.
Michel Coconis
Michel rejoins the PTO Board after a modest break from service, when she previously served as President-Elect and President of this board. Michel first came to PTO during the 2nd PTO conference, where she began to incorporate more of the ideas shared here into her social work and criminal justice courses, infusing improved pedagogical methods and philosophy with techniques from the Theatre of the Oppressed. Currently, she works as feminist assistant professor of social work at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio and as a mitigatiion investigator with persons facing the death penalty either at trial or who are already on a death row in the U.S. Other areas of interest are media reform, election reform, poverty, and women in prison - in each of which she hopes to expand her PTO connections.
Kelly Howe
Kelly Howe is an artist, teacher, and writer based in Austin, Texas, where she loves to direct new plays by local playwrights. She also facilitates a summer performance-devising program for youth in Louisville, Kentucky's Portland neighborhood. Kelly's writing appears in Theatre Topics and Theatre Journal. As a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas, Kelly writes primarily about twenty-first century Legislative Theatre projects and, more generally, relationships between TO, materialist feminism, and critical race theory.
Sonja Kuftinec
Sonja Arsham Kuftinec works as a facilitator in community-based theatre and conflict transformation. Since 1995 she has developed collaborative theatre projects with youth in the Balkans and Middle. Her new book, Theatre, Facilitation and Nation Formation in the Balkans and Middle East follows Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater (2003). She is currently experimenting with more dialogic forms of communication, working on several co-authored articles. Sonja also teaches performance and social change at the University of Minnesota. She served as the lead organizer of PTO's 2007 conference in Minneapolis.
Warren Linds
Warren Linds is Assistant Professor of Applied Human Sciences at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He has over twenty-five years experience in popular education and theatre for social change. His area of expertise is applying theatre and drama techniques in community and school settings. He has used these processes in health education for both youth and adults, anti-racism and anti-bullying programs, youth leadership programs, community development, and in adult education. Warren has published in the areas of group facilitation, anti-oppression and anti-racism pedagogy, the fostering of youth leadership, and alternative and arts-based approaches to qualitative research. Warren has been a board member since 2003.
Elle Meza
Elle Papalamaitcalli Meza Butterfly From The Lake House is a Social Studies teacher at Multicultural Indigenous Academy in St. Paul MN. She is also a single mother, a painter, and a traditional Mexica Aztec Danzante with the Cuauhtemoc circle. The intersections of these roles are met with culture as their base. She believes that culture is our weapon to be used for rebuilding the many nations who have and are currently suffering because of the economic, cultural, and spiritual imperialism they have been subject too. Her education was acquired through her travels, conversations, exchanges and institutions of academia.
Chaka Mkali
Chaka Mkali, originally from Los Angeles, California is the Teen Program Coordinator and Adult and Youth Organizer at Hope Community in the Phillips community of South Minneapolis. He works with teens and young adults using art and music as vehicles for social change and dialogue. He is a community organizer and trainer, musician, muralist, facilitator, avid record collector, and proud father of four.
Richard Piatt
Rick is a Ph.D. candidate in drama at Goldsmiths, University of London, an Augustinian friar, and theatre practitioner. Academically his current area of interest is in the dynamic histories and potentialities for dialogue between and among Frerian pedagogy, theatre of the oppressed and Latin American Theologies of Liberation. He has been a member of PTO since 2007.
Alejandra Tobar-Alatriz
Cheryl L. Wilson