BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Silverthorne is a registered 501 (c)(3) non-profit arts organization. If you are interested in supporting our work by becoming a member of the Board of Directors, please contact us via email to find out more about our work.

Ezekiel Baskin is a director, lighting designer, producer, and educator. They have served on the Silverthorne Board of Directors since October 2021, and have served as President since May 2023. Production credits with Silverthorne include assistant directing The Cake, lighting design for Bulrusher and Intimate Apparel, and stage management for Bright Half Life, The Revolutionists, and Stupid Fucking Bird.

Directing credits include To Serve The Hive (Theater Between Addresses/Pauline Productions), Grail Knight (Theater Between Addresses), Plague Wedding (Theater Between Addresses), Night Train (Electric Lite Collective), Queer Intimacies (Eggtooth Productions), Mr Burns: A Post-Electric Play (Hampshire College), and Caeneus (HC). Lighting design credits include the world premieres of When The Mind’s Free (Real Live Theatre) and NOW (Pauline Productions), A Little Night Music (Greater Worcester Opera), The *Annotated* Taming (Hampshire Shakespeare Company), The Life and Death of Queen Margaret (RLT), and numerous dance concerts for Five College Dance.

Ezekiel is a Founding Member of Theater Between Addresses, a collective of theatre artists & writers focused on fostering and creating new work, an Artistic Advisory Team Member for Play Incubation Collective, a Governing Member of Real Live Theatre, and Resident Lighting Designer for Pauline Productions. Ezekiel holds a B.A. from Hampshire College in Theatre, Education & Psychoanalytic Studies, with a focus on facilitating collaborative spaces. They host performances of all kinds at the Barn Theater and Studios in Belchertown. Beyond the stage, Ezekiel works in public health, currently serving as Rural Health Program Manager for the New England Rural Health Association.

Willow is thrilled to serve as a board member for Silverthorne Theater Company.  She is a singer, actor, stage manager, production manager, musical theater enthusiast, and serves as the managing director for the UMASS Amherst Department of Theater.  Prior to UMASS, Willow served as the Development and Marketing Manager for a chamber music summer festival in Putney, VT, Assistant Production Manager for the Calvin Theater in Northampton, and the Production Stage Manager for Commonwealth Opera Company, also in Northampton. Willow has stage managed more than 50 productions in New York City, Boston, Boulder, and Western Mass, and was the Founder and General Manager of Sweet Youth Productions, a nationally touring theater for children.

Robby has been involved with Silverthorne since the very beginning. A graduate of Northfield Mount Hermon School, his first experiences in theatre were working backstage on David Rowland’s shows. Robby graduated from Wheaton College (MA) with a B.A. in Theatre and Dance Studies, concentrating in technical theatre and theatrical design. He has worked on many aspects of STC productions, including set construction, lighting design, stage management, and arts administration. Robby has directed, designed, and provided technical support for local theater at the Shea Theater, the LAVA Center, Greenfield High School, and Stoneleigh-Burnham School.

Kyle Boatwright (she/her/hers) is an Easthampton-based performing artist, educator, and arts consultant. A long-time resident of the Pioneer Valley, she is deeply committed to equality, change, education, and activism through exceptional artistry. Kyle has acted in countless regional productions nationwide, including Silverthorne’s 2022 production of Bright Half Life. She is also an acclaimed music director/designer, composer, and writer, and holds a B.A. from Amherst College. Kyle is the co-founder of Rise Up Productions MA, a progressive Pioneer Valley collective that produces musical and theatrical benefits to support marginalized communities in the area.

Harley Erdman is a dramaturg, playwright, and scholar whose work focuses on adaptation and translation. His commissioned work as a translator of contemporary Latin American theater includes plays from Mexico, Nicaragua, and Chile. His Women Playwrights of Early Modern Spain (ITER, 2016) features his translations of ten plays, for the first time ever in English. It won the Josephine Roberts Award for best scholarly edition in the field of early modern women and gender. He is the author or editor of five other books, and a winner of the Association for Hispanic Classic Theater’s Translation Prize. Erdman has also published on the history of Jewish representation on the American stage.

His dramatic writing projects focus on rebels and outsiders in local history. These include the opera librettos The Scarlet Professor and The Garden of Martyrs, both with composer Eric Sawyer, as well as the screwball comedy Nobody’s Girl, which debuted at the Northampton Academy of Music. His cabaret musical, My Evil Twin, in collaboration with Sawyer, has toured Fringe festivals in the U.S. and Canada.

Erdman has taught in Scotland, El Salvador and Sri Lanka – in the latter country, as part of a Fulbright Fellowship. He is a professor in the UMass Theater Department, and a recipient of the Outstanding Teacher Award from the UMass College of Humanities and Fine Arts.

Hia Ghosh (she/they) is an actor, dancer and computer scientist, originally from Kolkata, India, who moved to the Pioneer Valley in 2016 to pursue their Ph.D. at UMass Amherst. They made their Silverthorne Theatre debut as Jane, in The Broken Machine and since then have found a theatre family at Silverthorne!  Regional theatre credits include: To Serve The Hive (Theater Between Addresses), Far, Far Better Things (WAM Theatre), and numerous productions at UMass Amherst, including Beatrice’s Dragon, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Aurash, Witch, Dance Nation and Monuments of the Future. She has also worked with Bread and Puppet Theatre, Northampton Playwrights Lab, Play Incubation Collective, and Not Ready for Bedtime Players.

Beyond the stage, Hia researches and practises inclusive pedagogy in computer science education across the Pioneer Valley. She is currently a lecturer at Smith College and researches accessibility in undergraduate and pre-college computer science classes. Growing up in India, they trained in ‘Bharatnatyam’, performed Tagore’s works and also appeared as a child actor in movies like ‘The Namesake’.

Sabine Denise Jacques is an aunty extraordinaire, sister, daughter, Massachusetts-based actor, facilitator, educator, and theater practitioner. She has spent the past ten years in Western Massachusetts, where she completed her B.A. in African-American Studies, M.Ed in International Education, a certificate in Multicultural Theater, along with social justice facilitation training from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a theater practitioner whose work is at the intersections of theater, education, and dialogue. Sabine Denise believes that the Arts are a space for creative and vulnerable expression and loves working with students and community members as they learn to express themselves creatively and author their own narratives. She is passionate about arts activism within Black & Brown communities and believes in the power of storytelling and its ability to provide space for vulnerability, healing, relationships & joy. Sabine Denise is a lover of Love and continues to find ways to be better and do better for herself and her community.

Gina Kaufmann is a director and teacher who moved to the Pioneer Valley in 2017 to join the Department of Theater faculty at UMass Amherst, where she is a professor of Acting and Directing. Her first (and very joyful) experience with Silverthorne Theater was directing Lauren Gunderson’s feminist comedy, The Revolutionists, in 2019.

Gina is a member of the Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC). She has worked as a director and acting coach in numerous regional venues, including Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, The Williamstown Theatre Festival, Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival and Sacramento Theatre Company. In New York, she directed for SoHo Rep, HOME for Contemporary Theatre and Art, Wings Theatre, and Dixon Place.

https://www.ginakaufmann.com/

Gabriel Levey is an actor, teacher, coach and theatre maker committed to the power of empathic vulnerability and unabashed play. 

A maker of theatrical comedy, Gabe’s original work includes: Dwellicle 109 (IRT); Brainsongs, or the play about the dinosaur farm (Yale Cabaret); And now we do LINDBERGH’S FLIGHT by Bertolt Brecht (Yale Cabaret); The Most Beautiful Thing in the World (Yale Cabaret/Boston University/Cloud City); How to Help the Self When the Self Needs Help with Carol A. Jantsen (The Peoples Improv Theater); and most recently A Super Serious and Not at All Funny Reading of Stories I Wrote After Brain Surgery (Northampton Center for the Arts). Recent acting credits include Three Sisters (Two River Theater), Intimate Apparel, The Cake (Silverthorne Theater), and Pulling at the Roots (Plays in Place). 

Gabe’s passion for teaching and for developing fun and physical approaches to acting led him to co-found (along with Christopher Bayes and Annelise Lawson) The Pandemonium Studio, a studio for the study of Clown, Commedia, and Improvisation in New York City. In the fall of 2019, with a focus on just, inclusive, diverse, and anti-racist actor training, as well as the creation and production of new works of theatrical comedy, Gabe founded Completely Ridiculous Productions. During the pandemic, the company transformed into The Completely Ridiculous Conservatory, a six-week online acting program that, within its first year, welcomed over 100 students from all over the world. 

He has also taught in traditional university settings such as NYU, Smith College, Amherst College and the Yale University Summer Program; high school settings such as The Professional Performing Arts High School in Manhattan, and The Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter High School in Massachusetts; as well as renowned regional theaters such as The Alliance, Berkshire Theater Group and Northern Stage, and more nimble institutions such as the Pine Box in Florence, MA, and The Funny School of Good Acting in Brooklyn, NY. 

Gabe holds a BFA in Acting from Boston University and an MFA in Acting from the Yale School of Drama.

Wynn MacKenzie (he/they) is a freelance theater technician, sound/lighting designer, apprentice carpenter, set painter, & interdisciplinary artist living and working on unceded Nonotuck land in western Massachusetts. He has sound designed for Silverthorne’s Bright Half Life and Broken Machine, and was invited to join Silverthorne’s board in 2024. In addition to Silverthorne, Wynn is also a Founding Member of local theater company Theater Between Addresses (“TBA”), currently creating experimental/immersive work in connection with land and memory. Notable past productions with TBA include To Serve the Hive, Grail Knight, and Night Train. An active freelancer, you can see sets he’s built and painted at the Majestic Theater and Chester Theater, find him backstage on the soundboard at Northampton’s First Night, see his lighting design in Jay Sefton’s Unreconciled, and catch him board op’ing shows at the Shea, to name a few. He is also an accomplished landscape painter, occasional poet, and musician of various stringed instruments, with an interest in sea shanties, train songs, and field recordings. He records and designs many of his own sounds for shows and projects, and endeavors to always listen to the more-than-human world. You can find more of his work at wynnmackenzie.com

Sam Samuels is an actor and director who first appeared onstage in the Pioneer Valley in 1978 and has been in many performances since. At Silverthorne he’s appeared in The Mystery of Irma Vep, Tar2f!, and The Cake. He’s also acted in productions at UMass Amherst, New Century Theatre, Panopera, Happier Valley Comedy, and Mt. Holyoke College Summer Theatre. On film, he’s appeared in Broadcast News, Read ‘Em and Weep, and numerous national and regional television commercials. Sam has directed operas for Panopera and for the Smith College music department.

He holds a degree in English from Harvard and an MFA in acting from NYU Tisch School for the Arts and completed coursework in the nonfiction writing program at The University of Iowa. His writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Sierra, and Smithsonian Magazine, among many others. He is Director of Gift Planning for Smith College. Sam is a proud member of Actors Equity Association and SAG-AFTRA. He was a contestant on Jeopardy! He came in second. The attorney came in third.

Throughout Lucinda Kidder’s 50-year career, theater and non-profit management have been interwoven. Since high school stage work piqued her interest in that world, and her first directing job in India cemented it. She completed her MA in Theater Education at Emerson College and went on to direct over 150 plays, teach all aspects of theater at every level from little kids to university courses, and found and manage seven different theater groups wherever she has lived.
In 1999 she returned to academia to pursue an MFA in directing at UMass Amherst. There, and through subsequent doctoral studies, she explored and worked in the areas of Renaissance Theater, International Theater, Shakespearean Analysis and Performance, Multiculturalism, and Translation Studies. While at UMass she initiated a five-week intensive summer program for middle school students in Holyoke and Springfield, and with two collaborators, organized Unexpected Journeys – a festival of plays by women from Islamic cultures.
Kidder joined forces in 2014 with Northfield Mount Hermon colleague David Rowland to create Silverthorne Theater Company, and acted as managing director through 2021

David Rowland retired in 2013 after 47 years of teaching, the last 35 as director of the Theatre Program at Northfield Mount Hermon School where he taught Acting, Directing, and other theater courses, and directed over 100 major productions. Shortly after his retirement, Rowland and Lucinda Kidder began talking about starting a professional theater company in Franklin County.

Silverthorne Theater Company, named after the principal performing space on NMH’s old Northfield campus, was officially founded in 2014, celebrating that first year with productions of Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy (directed by Kidder) and Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle (directed by Rowland) in NMH’s Chile’s Theater.

Following two years at GCC’s Sloan Theater, Silverthorne moved in 2017 to its present home on the fourth floor of Hawks & Reed Performing Arts Center in downtown Greenfield. Rowland directed the first production in this new venue, the Long, Singer, and Winfield parody, The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare (abridged), with three actors offering comically twisted excerpts from the Bard’s collected works.

Rowland directed A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters as a benefit for Silverthorne in the LAVA Center, Greenfield, in February of 2020. After retiring from active membership on Silverthorne’s board of directors, Rowland consulted with the board to help chart Silverthorne’s course through and beyond the current pandemic.