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Becky Stark - lead actress (Madeline)/Songwriter
 Becky Stark is an acclaimed singer and songwriter. She most recently released the album Love to Live with her band The Living Sisters on Vanguard Records. She is the leader of the folk punk band Lavender Diamond and founder of the L.A. Ladies Choir, a collective of 30 women dedicated to creating healing experiences through music. She sang the role of Margaret on the The Decemberists' 2009 album The Hazards of Love and joined Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward's band She & Him for their Volume 1 tour. She is the creator of the art video series Califunya for which she collaborated with Miranda July, Jim Drain, and Tunde Adebimpe among others.
She studied Russian Literature and Semiotics at Brown University and dance at The Merce Cunningham Conservatory. In 1998 she starred in the PBS film Willa, An American Snow White. She also starred in the original production of opera visionary Ruth Margraff's The Cry Pitch Carols at the Salvage Vanguard Theater. She appeared in High School Record, a favorite at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. In 2008 she appeared as the songmaster in the The City of Ember starring Bill Murray for which she also wrote the songs of the Believers.
Harry Shearer - Actor (Dorian Byrd and Dr. Keely) - harryshearer.com
 Harry Shearer is a comic personality who takes "hyphenate" to new levels. First and foremost an actor, he is also an author, director, satirist, musician, radio host, playwright, multi-media artist and record label owner.
For nineteen years the Los Angeles native has enjoyed enormous success and planted the fruits of his talents in the heads of millions worldwide thanks to his voice work for The Simpsons and The Simpsons Movie. Shearer plays a stable of characters: most notably Mr. Burns, Smithers, Ned Flanders, Rev. Lovejoy and Scratchy.
In July, 2007, Shearer plunged into the on-line video universe when the Harry Shearer Channel became a cornerstone of My Damn Channel, an entertainment studio and new media platform specifically created to empower artists to co-produce, distribute and monetize original, episodic video content. Each week a new political or pop culture satire written by and featuring Shearer is unveiled.
Movie audiences mainly know Shearer through his many collaborations with Christopher Guest and friends, beginning with Rob Reiner's This Is Spinal Tap (1984) and continuing through the folk comedy A Mighty Wind (2003) and For Your Consideration (2006), a hilarious depiction of independent filmmaking and the "buzz" about a potential award nomination.
In the early 1980s, he and friends Michael McKean and Christopher Guest, along with director Rob Reiner, began to incubate an idea for a fake documentary about an aging heavy metal band. The resulting movie, This Is Spinal Tap, became the granddaddy of the mock-umentary genre and gave theworld new insight into the concepts of spontaneously-combusting drummers and amps that go up to eleven. The band was reunited in July 2007, for a special performance at The Live Earth Concert at London's Wembley Stadium.
Shearer's other film credits include Real Life, The Right Stuff, Portrait Of A White Marriage, The Fisher King, Godzilla, The Truman Show, Small Soldiers, and Dick. He has been a regular cast member on Saturday Night Live twice and, in 2002, wrote and directed his first feature film, Teddy Bears' Picnic.
And on radio, Shearer's one-hour satirical sandbox LE SHOW is heard weekly on stations worldwide.
Joseph Meissner - Director/Actor (Matt) - josephmeissner.com
 Joseph has worked with some of the most influential theater directors of the last century, including Jerzy Grotowski, Andre Gregory (My Dinner with Andre) and Lee Breuer (The Gospel at Colonus). He graduated with honors from Brown University in 1993 with a degree in Theater.
In 1995, Joseph joined a small group of actors in a project led by Andre Gregory to explore Grotowskian performance training and Chekhov monologues. With Andre's recommendation, Joseph was able to travel to Pontedera, Italy in the Fall of that year to train at Grotowsky's secluded and highly selective performance studio.
Returning to the U.S. in 1996, Joseph worked with Salvage Vanguard on Ruth Margraff's rock operetta Wallpaper Psalm and with New York-based Mabou Mines Theater on The Red Horse Animation, directed by writer/director Lee Breuer. The Red Horse toured to an international experimental theater festival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As part of the rehearsal process, Joseph received intensive training in contact improv dance and Ashtanga yoga.
Between 1995 and 2001, Joseph worked closely with the nationally-recognized Salvage Vanguard Theater in Austin, TX, acting in lead roles in award-winning productions. In December 2000 theater critic Robert Faires of the Austin Chronicle wrote of The Cry Pitch Carrolls, "The performers bring great heart to the tale: There [are] raw wails of pain in Joseph Meissner's fully grown Small Christus. The [actresses] reveal moving depths . . . and Meissner provides the ideal counterpoint to each." Michael Barnes of the Austin-American Statesman called Joseph's performance "uncanny." He wrote, "only once in a very long while have we seen anything this mesmerizingly original."
Joseph's credits as a stage director in include the world premeires of Heidi Carla's All in a Day's Idyll at the 1992 Brown New Plays Festival, and Adam Sobsey's The Essence of Comedy for Salvage Vanguard in 2000.
In 2001, Joseph moved to New Orleans and founded Shaolin-Do Kung Fu & Tai Chi, where he teaches martial arts and conducts private fitness and self-defense training. He has acted in many film projects and in 2003 collaborated with Kathy Randels and Jay Hammons of Moving Humans/ArtSpot on the performance pieces Venus, Vulcan, Mars and The Dancing Dwarf.
Joseph directed the short film Brook & Bern in 2008 and co-wrote the upcoming feature film Flood Streets with his wife, The Hatchery's co-founder Helen Krieger. He plays the lead role of detective Jack Spade in the upcoming feature film, The Jack of Spades.
Helen Krieger - Writer/Producer
Originally from Hartford, Wisconsin, Helen Krieger got her BA in psychology from the University of Dallas, then moved to Boston, where she worked as a journalist before once again being tempted by the South.
She moved to New Orleans in 2001 and co-founded a local paper, The Bywater Marigny Current, which she ran for several years before turning it over to her partner so she could get her real estate license.
Krieger was working as a real estate agent when Hurricane Katrina hit, and her experiences trying to rebuild the ravaged housing market after the storm inspired her to start writing again.
In the early morning, she wrote notes on the surreal experiences she'd had the day before, then she donned a face mask and gloves to meet with clients and inspectors at flooded homes. These notes later became award-winning stories and the inspiration for her first feature, Flood Streets.
Krieger's stories have won a Eureka! Short Stories Fellowship Award, a Moondancer Fellowship and placed as a finalist for the William Faulkner Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. She’s received several grants to pursue writing including a Cultural Economy Grant to study novel construction at the Algonkian Writer’s Conference in San Francisco.
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